"Learn to analyze well. Assess the risks and the prospective rewards, and keep it simple."
"Stay fit. You don’t want to get old and feel bad. You’ll also get a lot more accomplished and feel better about yourself if you stay fit. I didn’t make it to 91 by neglecting my health."
It's a good final letter and has good advice. Complicated guy, complicated legacy, but good advice.
That statement and others show me the Pickens was trying to help others, to encourage them. I especially like the list of guidelines at the bottom of the page.
> Don’t look to government to solve problems — the strength of this country is in its people.
I’ve been reading One-Storied America[0], a book from 1935 by two Soviet humorists visiting the United States. The book echos this perspective on every page.
[0] you can find a good 1937 translation online under the title Little Golden America by Charles Malamuth.
> Stay fit. You don’t want to get old and feel bad. You’ll also get a lot more accomplished and feel better about yourself if you stay fit. I didn’t make it to 91 by neglecting my health.
This. Many people don't realize that staying fit isn't a quest to live longer but to live physically better in the later ages.
I cringe when someone tells me stuff like "yeah but that dude smoked and never exercised and lived until 80s while the fit guy got cancer and it didn't help him" ... yes but you forgot to mention that living life in his body became a miserable experience since 45 vs. someone else who may have died in 60s of cancer but in fact spent something like 50 fulfilling years feeling great.
Staying fit may not save you from cancer or car accident, but but the life is so much better when you live in a fit body.
I find it mesmerizing that people on this thread have a problem with the criticism of a highly influential person upon their death. I mean were people bound to say only positive things when Augusto Pinochet and Robert Mugabe dusted off?
Obviously I don't think T Boone shares the legacy of violent dictators but my point is that those clutching their pearls here trying to categorically separate themselves from those who speak ill of the dead are not separate at all. They either don't believe what Pickens did was all that bad or they don't believe he did bad things. On their spectrum of "posthumous criticism" Pickens lies on the positive side of their personal threshold.
I don't know enough about him to pass moral judgement, but it seems like many others think that they do (after a quick scan of Wikipedia, meh, that's good enough).
It just seems crass to be flippantly judgmental when the guy just died, and in response to his last elegant / humble / insightful "post" to the world.
I'm also confused at the implicit viewpoints that, IMO, are at odds with the HN/YC ethos of "individual hussle/initiative/hack your way to huge growth/etc". I.e. if Pickens wasn't from another generation and another industry, I think he'd fit in very well with the HN/YC types (disclaimer/ha, I'm making an assumption that I just chastised others for doing).
Anyway, makes me wonder if the "real HN" crowd has moved on elsewhere.
I think there's been a huge change in HN's tone over the last 1-2 years or thereabouts towards "takedowns" and lots of negative rhetoric against people, companies, technologies etc. I used to think it was mostly just specific things, like anti-Musk sentiment because a lot of people find him grating, but I now think its mostly just a reflection of the general anti-tech that's very much in vogue.
I also think it's a one-way street, because it's very asymmetrical. It's super quick, easy and satisfying to burn someone because they appear to be a hypocrite, but quite hard to make the counter-case, because reality is often messy and grey (such as this guy, who was both an oil man and a wind energy man). So fewer and fewer people will bother to do all that work to reply to negativity, which will naturally lead to more voice/upvotes on one side, which makes it even more onerous to reply etc.
> I think there's been a huge change in HN's tone over the last 1-2 years
Replace "HN" with "the world" and I'd agree with you. I think your average person is so exhausted by the shrieking of the the online naysayers that they just reduce their involvement. For example, I saw an article recently about Andrew Yang's very intelligent, classy response to those racist comments from that prospective SNL comedian, and then he was pilloried for "pandering to the white vote". While lots of folks came to Yang's defense, it was just sad that they had to.
I often think that the Internet has fundamentally altered the "freedom of speech" calculus in that it allows people to say outrageous things for attention, but largely ignore the negative consequences (i.e. social opprobrium) of those statements. I have no idea what the solution is, but I don't think it will get better any time soon.
I suppose you'd have to look back and see what's changed in the world (and particularly in the lives of HN's primarily American demographic) to understand why this is happening. I'd be more explicit in my suspicions as to what that is, but considering the tone of the parent and grandparent comment, I imagine that I'd be courting a very un-HN-like argument in doing so, so I'll hold back. Suffice it to say that the willingness for people to "shriek" at things they hold prejudice to, regardless of the actual facts, didn't so much "change" into its current paradigm as it was "unleashed."
I agree with you, but I'd also argue the very act of "unleashing" can in fact multiply that negative sentiment in individuals where it would otherwise stay relatively tame.
For example, I saw a mini-documentary recently about people who may have harbored what I'll call "questioning/prejudiced" views, but then fell down the YouTube rabbit-hole of full on racist/Nazi/white-supremacist videos and turned into full-on racist conspiracy theorists.
I don't think it is anti-tech, so much as anti big money.
Tech isn't as sexy when you realize how it is funded. Tech use to be about people working in their garages and striking rich on hard work, perseverance.
I agree with this sentiment. Being on here for 6 years now, the overwhelming perspective is love to hate along with the mob rules. Go against the mob and you will be downvoted to oblivion. Ridiculing someone that cannot depend themselves is just a new low in moral character amongst HN users.
The stated goal of Hacker News is "Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
Mainstream topics allowed from any source so long as they meet that criteria or presents "evidence of some interesting new phenomenon." This site has never been exclusively for technical topics. Flagging stories merely because you don't find them interesting, because they're mainstream or because they come from a mainstream site is an abuse of flagging privileges. You can just ignore such stories, hide them, upvote the content you would rather see or post more of such content.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. _If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic._
Probably, not definitely. Mainstream news covers plenty of stories which would be relevant here.
If you don't believe me, talk to the admin and the guy who made the site[0]. The problem here is not the mainstream nature of articles being posted, but the low effort being put in by commenters. Plenty of tech-related stories have plenty of garbage comments as well. Most of the discussion around RMS has been a dumpster fire.
Right. I'm not saying definitely no politics, but there's a ton of political content that is not really that interesting (like the two stories that were just on the front page about the US drone strike killing pine nut farmers in Afghanistan that are sliding down the ranking fast). It has been a growing trend. Maybe I spend too much time on the site, but I usually see most of the threads that get flagged/dead.
And I agree with my parent poster -- lobste.rs is a much better curated feed of interesting topics to me -- I'm not on it yet, because I sort of feel that I've made an investment here in the community.
I’ve had a hard time understanding and using lobste.rs
When I visit the site it seems like I need to already know what community to join. Which sticks me with the problem of not knowing which to join. Googling was not helpful.
Is this the sort of thing that I have to know someone to invite me and kick start me into use?
I guess I’ll eventually get around to joining irc chat to get an invite. But I suppose this is useful for filtering out slackers like me who can’t figure out how to join :)
> there's been a huge change in HN's tone over the last 1-2 years or thereabouts towards "takedowns" and lots of negative rhetoric against people, companies, technologies etc.
I've been around HN for almost 10 years now and what has happened on HN is noteworthy. In the "old" days, Hacker News was literally called Startup News and startups and the whole optimism around them was celebrated. Even though there were some famous examples of kind of chopping down an idea -- it wasn't done in some kind of anti-capitalist, political way, but in a typical "nerdy" kind of way. Here's probably the most famous example:
> I have a few qualms with this [Dropbox] app:
1. For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
2. It doesn't actually replace a USB drive. Most people I know e-mail files to themselves or host them somewhere online to be able to perform presentations, but they still carry a USB drive in case there are connectivity problems. This does not solve the connectivity issue.
3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the service, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this? [1].
Now, if we did a Show HN for Dropbox today, the negative comments would be something similar to this:
"Why would you want to store files on a cloud on that generates a huge carbon footprint and support some VC-backed "n-ist"* company that doesn't support government-owned health care and only exists to make profits for shareholders? And besides, there's $preferred_Javascript_framework that can do it without having to conform to the anti-competition walled garden or have any need to use S3 and support Amazon's unfair labor practices."
The "old" way wasn't questioning the act of making money from an invention (capitalism,) while the "new" way has gotten all kinds of pseudo-woke. It seems like "new" HN has become severely anti-capitalist and more interested in shitting on the very system that created (and continues to create) some of the most important, useful technology the world has ever seen. There's a lot of nonsense, for sure (i.e. Juicero,) but then again there was a lot of nonsense in the 1800s [2] and other periods of great technological accomplishment. It's normal to have a bunch of noise with the signal.
We literally can order almost anything from anywhere and have it brought to your door. There are cars that drive themselves. There are aircraft that fly themselves. There are affordable watches that you can use to make phone calls and actually do an ECG. That's amazing. But rather than critiquing the tech in typical nerd-debate fashion (like old Hacker News,) instead there is a distinct group that would spend time attacking Apple's tax strategies or Amazon's carbon footprint. That's significant because it marks a change from the days where companies like Apple were seen as "creating the future" instead now, they are seen as "obligated to pay for a country's social programs because they're so big." That's just nuts. Rather that promoting tech companies of all sorts and sizes and promoting the creation of the future, instead a lot of words are written demanding that those companies pay more to governments. That those companies should somehow be penalized or punished for being successful (from building things people want and find very useful.)
I'm going to get downvoted into oblivion (because circa 2019 Hacker News,) but I feel like the problem here is that as Hacker News went more international, many of the afflictions endemic to Europe have become a bigger influence here on Hacker News. The indefinite pessimism of Europe [3][4] has infected this community specifically and much of Silicon Valley in general. Essentially the indefinite pessimists have pushed out the optimists. Perhaps there's some hope though and the pendulum will swing back to the Definite Optimism of the 1950s and 1960s -- guys like Elon Musk, the late Steve Jobs and a few others seem to have been trying pretty hard to bring back the excitement and optimism of building the future. However, for every Musk, there are dozens of "leaders" who care to preach Doomsday predictions and FUD rather than moving full speed towards building something really cool and useful. Airplanes are a canary here. Flying from Singapore to London used to be considered amazing. Now instead of celebrating human mobility at a scale never before possible (and taking advantage of the opportunities that brings for peace, understanding, and commerce,) instead people lament the carbon footprint and shareholder value of the airline.
Thanks for posting this, it's much more in-depth and well-thought-out than what I posted.
I think the older HN was more balanced - ie the famous Dropbox launch thread had both "cool, my mom will love this" and "lame, I already do this with rsync". But even on the more general topics of climate change or capitalism, there was a decent mix - I remember one of the very first articles on Jacobinmag made it to the front page. Even if you don't subscribe to any of their ideology, it was still good to get exposed to it and consider it.
I guess the worst thing that I could say about HN today is that it is not as interesting. As discussion becomes more monotonous and predictable, there's fewer new or surprising things that get brought up. I also think it's not really HN-specific, but a small website getting caught up in the zeitgeist.
It's more than "anti-tech sentiment" - in many cases, it's darkly hinting that democidal totalitarianism would be a good idea. (Or at least that the extreme left deserves a fortieth or fiftieth chance to implement all its ideas, and maybe they won't produce democidal totalitarian regimes this time.) And it's everywhere now, not just on HN.
Those comments are all now dead or nearly so and I wouldn't have even seen them if your comment weren't calling attention to them. Please don't do that. Just downvote or flag them and trust others to do the same. Otherwise we end up having another discussion about HN instead of about the submission.
> Anyway, makes me wonder if the "real HN" crowd has moved on elsewhere.
Please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
You're right; I was very early into this thread, when those comments were still at the top.
And also the mobile app I use doesn't have a down vote button, so my "I want to react" urge had to go through a new comment instead of the voting itself. I'll flip over to chrome and down vote there next time.
Agreed. Currently reading the biography of Disney, and it’s so depressing to hear he was the punching bag of every writer, journalist, critic, and university professor throughout the 60s.
Was Disney the conformist racist simpleminded backwater troglodyte they claimed, or were they?
It’s hard to not be bothered by the pettiness of the “cold and timid souls who neither know victory or defeat”. But I once felt hacker news had fewer of those voices.
Having read several bio's of Disney, I'd say he wasn't.
The worst factual criticism that can be pointed at Disney was he was overly sentimental for a past that never was. He painted American history in such a way to present a "smooth façade of sentimentality and stubborn optimism".
He was very much a man of his time, he wasn't known to use racial epithets - but was racially insensitive like most men of his era - he had several jews in his inner circle, and none of his employees (even the ones who didn't like him) would say he was anti-Semitic - but he allied himself with anti-communist groups that had a strong anti-Semitic bend to them.
I would argue on whole, he left the world a better place than he found it however, the technical improvements he and his company introduced to the world of animation left a huge and lasting impact felt the world over.
I think the fact that your foundation of historical context requires a need to consult Wikipedia to know who/what T. Boone Pickens was is a good predictor of that negative knee-jerk response given popular culture today as so much of it relies on minimal historical context.
Hacking is the playful application of ingenuity, or achieving things the experts in the field thought were impossible. Pickens, whatever his merits, didn't do that and didn't value it. Hacking is not tricking people and ripping them off.
we never pay for the environmental cost. when we buy stuff, we basically always pay only part of the cost, the immediately visible cost, the intrinsic value of a product. the other costs they basically steal from us in the form of a destroyed future. the fallacy of consumerism.
"We" get a discount today and "we" will pay back tomorrow. It's definitely not "they" making a profit on that discount. If they acted more responsibly it's "we" who'd cover extracts. At the end of the day, "their" profit would be the same.
If you tax to cover externalities then consumption goes down and producers make lower profits. The magnitude of these differences are debatable, but their direction is not.
But the tax doesn't disappear into thin air. People will be hired to fix externalities (e.g. plant trees) or get incentives to buy other stuff that has less externalities. It's not like those money will vanish from the economy.
I think the argument was against the significant environmental problems and the lobbying (e.g. against climate laws) coming from the big players in the energy industry, rather than against electricity and central heating. We can still have the latter without the former.
But the dirty episode was required to reach this stage when we can move onto next thing. And some time later today's "clean" likely will be seen as dangerous in some way. Just like today's "dirty" didn't seem that dirty when it came out. E.g. cars helped to relieve cities from horse shit.
This attitude is amazingly shortsighted and revisionist. Presumably you also take issue with Edison, Westinghouse, and Tesla? Why didn't those idiots choose renewables like wind and solar when commercializing electricity?
How about Ford and Sloan? Those boneheads should've gone with lithium ion!
Arguably yes. We had people thinking about the issue of carbon emissions in the early 1900s. Arrhenius talked about the greenhouse effect in 1890 or so.
By 1960 we had clear evidence CO2 in the atmosphere was rising, and we had fairly clear evidence it influences the climate.
In 1965, the presidential science advisory committee warned of the problem in an official report.
By 1970, the American Petroleum Institute had a study from Stanford that they commissioned, confirming the problem. From then on, the oil industry actively engaged in propaganda to discredit that science.
So, even if he didn't get it right when he started, he knew by mid-career. And he happily continued selling out.
It's a world which will be uninhabitable for us unless we take some drastic action now. Drastic action which his industry is throwing everything into opposing.
No he wasn't. He was just playing for money and for name recognition. He did absolutely nothing in the wind industry except attach his name to it. He built nothing. He developed nothing. He achieved nothing.
It's worth noting that the newest generations in developed nations (XYZ) are the most carbon intensive creatures this planet has had to date, in 300+ million years of vertebrate life.
You can't really blame his legacy without accepting some personal responsibility at the same time.
Either take the cross off or put the knickers back on as they say.
I at least am! Since the scale of the problem became clear around 2012:
First the big one:
* Politically support the Greens (GroenLinks), switching from the center-center/right parties (D66 or VVD if you google).
Then the smaller things:
* I've rejected a number of contracts the last two years which required significant travel or were for the fossil industry. I'd be $200k richer if I accepted one or two of them. Climate wasn't the only reason (young kids and father in law with cancer/stroke who needed my help played a part too).
* I haven't flown in 5-6 years (I live in the NL, my family in UK so this is a sacrifice). This is hard because travel is a passion of mine.
* I cycle everywhere whenever possible.
* I drive a tiny car and haven't upgraded it yet for environmental reasons.
* I've drastically cut my meat intake especially of beef.
* I'm spending $100k on my new house making it as close to 0 carbon as possible.
* Generally repairing instead of replacing stuff as much as possible.
Once I'm back to billing hours I'll be repaying my and my partner's climate debt by funding projects which remove carbon from the atmosphere. Only the "gold standard" projects, not the $10 clearly fraudulent "offsets" that the airlines try to sell you.
I wish there was a block user feature on hn. Frankly, with about half the commenters in this thread, I think I would be better off if I didn't run across their inane comments on any subject any more.
100%. Back in the day our offline mail readers (for BBSs, CompuServe, BIX) had "twit filters" (black lists). An essential feature missing from most online forums today.
I used to have grease monkey scripts for reddit years ago before mobile, but it just was too clunky. I want a way to quickly apply dom actions on my mobile browser that should do the trick.
I used to worry about creating an echo chamber by black listing people but now I’m just so tired, I’d rather have an echo chamber than a frequent “what the fuck is this garbage, oh it’s another comment by prepend”
I think its a rather rank misinterpretation of my comment to suggest that I believe there is no personal agency whatsoever. Obviously a great many of the thing things that happen to a person are causally related to their choices.
What is absurd is the believe that _everything_ is related to your own actions and thus that you deserve all the good and or bad that comes your way.
What bugs me about the quote is that its a perversion of a sort of stoicism towards which I am much more positively disposed. But the stoic is not so silly as to believe they are responsible for everything that happens to them. They believe they are responsible for _responding_ to it and ultimately not responsible for where it comes from. A true stoic accepts material success and failure with the same attitude: I must make the most of this situation to do good.
That is a respectable attitude, though it perhaps undersells our capacity to actually change the world. This attitude is just intellectual laziness and quite self serving as well.
Pretty common in people of high net worth. After all, if it wasn't personal agency that got them all that wealth then why did it happen? The answer is uncomfortable and so it gets muted by a feel-good thought.
I think people (including me) have the biggest problem with taking credit for success. There is usually a lot of luck involved, factors larger than yourself, and support from other people. Many talented and deserving people, whose abilities and potential may very well exceed our own, don't see success. So when you do find it, stay humble.
Agreed. People often overestimate the value of truth.
While it's immensely valuable to have factual information and put that information to use, truth (or objectivity, we could say) is less important in one's mindset throughout life.
Take those who believed they were destined by God to succeed: they include Rockefeller, who developed pipelines to bring kerosene (and thus light) to the masses for cheaper, and even a favorite in the history of tech, Ada Lovelace.
The validity of their beliefs, or lack thereof, had no impact on their inspiration to pursue their goals or their ultimate successes.
For some definitions of useful. Certainly useful if you find yourself enriched by chance and don't want to consider the circumstances of other people, less lucky.
> Thomas Boone Pickens Jr. was an American business magnate and financier. Pickens chaired the hedge fund BP Capital Management. He was a well-known takeover operator and corporate raider during the 1980s. As of November 2016, Pickens had a net worth of $500 million.
So, it seems, a "financial" predator, possibly of the worst kind. Not a lot of sympathy for these kind of people.
Edit: to be clear, "late" philanthropists are a nice thing, but as Ricardo Semler [0] once said, "If you need to give away money, you took too much in the first place".
> "If you need to give away money, you took too much in the first place".
This is a strange sentiment to find on a board that is at least partially targeted at aspiring company founders.
For example the money Bill Gates is giving away is mostly in the form of shares of Microsoft. Those didn't exist before he started the company (with others of course). He signed some paperwork, then later 500 million shares (or however many) came into existence and he had them. Who did he take them from?
Later on other people decided they also wanted shares of Microsoft and assigned them a monetary value. Did Bill Gates somehow force them to want the shares he had? To the extent that he "took" money it was in exchange for shares of a company that other people found valuable.
> This is a strange sentiment to find on a board that is at least a partially targeted at aspiring company founders.
It's not inconsistent. Most founders are trying to create companies that provide economic value; one can believe that the creation of economic value is a good thing, while also believing that more of the economic surplus created should directly go to the common good.
Exactly. Everything he's saying seems reasonable, but the consequence is that there are single people that own 150,000,000,000$. Such a staggeringly absurd amount of money cannot be be a good thing for the public at large. We shouldn't rely on the good will of our fief lords to donate their money, in fact just look at Mr 150 billion who openly says "I can't think of anything that deserves a donation".
The corollary is obvious. Tax the ultra-rich at high marginal rates to force them to contribute back to the society that made their success possible in the first place.
The money is a byproduct of a good thing. Amazon is a net positive for humanity. Bezos having $150B is a byproduct of the amazing thing he and many others made.
So a single person having that much can certainly be a good thing, or a neutral thing, or a bad thing. But it’s not something that I have to think about fixing.
The literature is really clear that taxing the rich won’t do what you think it will do. It’s also surprising because this sentiment somehow thinks the rich are not already taxed. Wealth is taxed during transactions, not at rest. And the rich buy stuff like all others.
Ahem. Microsoft screwed quite a few companies/people in their day. Share value is almost direct consequence of that screwing. I'm not strictly against it, but I'd just like that awareness of it to still be on the table when considering things.
> This is a strange sentiment to find on a board that is at least a partially targeted at aspiring company founders.
It's not a universally held belief that a company founder must try to make as much money for themselves as possible.
Entrepreneurs, like everyone else, have values, and some of the values are in conflict with some of their actions. I have a hard time imagining anyone (excluding sociopaths) who legitimately believe their actions don't create any conflict with their values. Discussing the conflict between "I want to start a company" and "I believe there's a maximum amount of wealth that one can morally or ethically acquire" seems super relevant to the audience here.
> He signed some paperwork, then later 500 million shares (or however many) came into existence and he had them. Who did he take them from?
I don't think it's worth getting hung up on whether anyone "took" wealth versus created it, because I'm not sure those are mutually exclusive. I would argue MS "took" money from people via unfair bundling practices, many of which were anticompetitive and landed the company in hot water. If you want to be simplistic, MS under BG took money from everyone who was forced to buy a windows license despite not wanting or needing one, at the very least.
> I don't think it's worth getting hung up on whether anyone "took" wealth versus created it, because I'm not sure those are mutually exclusive.
I am hung up on this because I do think they're mutually exclusive. You can't create something that already exists. You can't take something that doesn't exist. Something has to exist in order for you to take it. If you created something, it impossible that you have taken it.
The quote implies that there is some big pile of money out there and rich people are just greedy people who take more of it than everyone else. While poor people are ... polite I guess? and only take a little amount. If someone honestly believes this then the only question is, why don't you just take more of this money? I mean it's apparently all just there for the taking and the only differentiating factor of the rich is their willingness to take more of it, right? There couldn't possibly be anything else that rich people do that results in them being rich.
He took them from the employees of Microsoft who's work helped make those shares valuable.
Edit: Apparently this statement needs further clarification. What do those shares represent? A share of the profits. And what are the profits? Literally the difference between the company's revenues and expenses. It's literally the difference between the value created by workers and the salary the company paid them in return for that value.
So _of course_ Bill Gates took that wealth from the company's workers. That's what profit is!
----------
Now to expand on the broader idea, in a Democratic Socialist economy where the stock corporation is replaced by the worker cooperative, he would not have had the right to claim 500 million shares. Those shares would have been distributed to the employees of Microsoft based on some metric of contribution to the company. Or would never have existed in the first place, and each worker would have had a vote in how the company was run and the profits distributed.
In either method, Bill Gates would have gotten some still significant portion of the value the company created, but no where near the amount he walked away with in our current economy. The rest of that value would have been distributed to the company's workers in one way or another - profit distributions, shares, dividends, what have you.
In the minds of many - myself included - that is a much more equitable system. Bill Gates took the money from the people who helped create it in the first place. And he took a share that far out paced his contribution to the creation of that value.
He was able to do that because our economic system is set up around authoritarian companies, where the founders and CEOs have near dictatorial power (or oligarchical power with the board). And dictatorships are rarely equitable.
Salary is how companies distribute value to employees and Microsoft paid it's employees. Many people would prefer cold hard cash over stock that may be nothing but fireplace lighting material in five years. Likewise making 30% less this year because the company did badly for reasons in no way related to you doesn't sit well with many people either.
And the difference between that salary and the company's revenues (the value the workers created) is the profits. Which the shares represent a right to.
Can we at least agree that - whether voluntary or not - the share literally represent the excess value taken from workers?
Cause that's what I was saying in response to the question. Those shares represent the value taken from workers.
As to it being voluntary, it's not. There's a massive power differential in the negotiations. That's what unions were meant to help solve, but unions can't really solve that power differential (they were never strong enough) and they've got their own problems of corruption and power.
The idea behind a worker cooperative based system isn't that workers take stock as payment instead of cash. They still get a cash salary. They also get ownership of company and a right to decide what happens to the profits.
There are several approaches to how you design that system. In one you do away with the concept of stock (ownership shares) altogether - it's a one person one vote system. In another you keep the concept of ownership shares and workers earn shares in proportion to their time at the company. Maybe you keep an aspect of negotiation and the shares they earn are tied to their negotiated salary.
But you no longer allow outside investors to purchase ownership of the company. Or founders to maintain a controlling share long past the point where their contributions have been matched or outweighed by the rest of the company's employees.
In this system we recognize that companies, like countries, are communities that should be run democratically by the people involved in them for the people involved in them.
> Bill Gates took the money from the people who helped create it in the first place.
This doesn't make sense. This would imply that a Microsoft employee had more money before working at Microsoft than they did after working at Microsoft. That is objectively not the case.
That's what it means to take something. Someone else has something. You take it. They don't have it anymore.
When an employee works at Microsoft he creates value. He didn't have that value before he did the work, he created it through the work done there.
Microsoft pays him a salary in return for his value.
However, the salary Microsoft pays does not match the full value he created. The difference is Microsoft's profits. The company is taking those profits from the workers who created the value in the first place. They didn't have that value when they joined, they created it there, but it's still taken from them at time of creation.
Those shares represent a right to a share of those profits. Stock shares literally represent a right to the excess value taken from the workers who created it.
So who did Bill Gates take that money from? The workers who created the value the money represents.
And this is how you wind up with massive wealth inequality and all the problems that creates.
People recognize the problems with wealth inequality. The recognize the problems with unions (which have their own power problems and corruption problems). They recognize the problem with having the government redistribute the wealth (which is still better than allowing the inequality to continue to grow).
But we're so ingrained with the idea that the way things are is the way they should be that we rarely talk about a pretty obvious solution - let those who generate the wealth have democratic control over what happens to it at the time of generation.
Capitalism works on the fact that different people value things differently. That asymmetry in value allows people to trade things so that I can give up something that I value less in order to get something that I value more.
Perhaps I could sit at home alone and write fragments of Windows kernel code by myself. These would be of very little value to me. However, they might be of tremendous value to Microsoft who has the whole rest of the Windows kernel and licensing agreements to distribute it and a sales staff to sell it and etc and etc and etc.
So I trade my fragments of Windows kernel code which do not benefit me very much to Microsoft. In exchange Microsoft gives me money, which is much more useful to me than code fragments because I can use it to buy food and shelter. I have actually received something that is of more value to me than the thing I gave up. The code fragments on their own could not have gotten me food or shelter.
Microsoft on the other hand, gave up money that is of less value to them than these code fragments. They can use the code fragments to create more value than they could with the money by combining them with their other assets. Value is relative, not absolute. Nothing is being stolen by paying someone a price they agree to for something, just because you have a better way of making use of it than they do.
The worker's cooperative who loaned the money to my worker's cooperative would be liable for the losses. I assume they would have to eat the loss then?
He was the main sponsor of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that spread a bunch of lies about John Kerry's Vietnam service during the 2016 presidential campaign.
There are good corporate raiders and bad ones, T. Boone Pickens ends up near the far end of bad.
His main shtick was to propose a buy-out or merger, wait for the stock to rise on the news, dump it and then never follow through. That doesn't take care of 'struggling businesses', nor does it 'fix their management processes'. Your 401k might still agree but for wholly different reasons than you think.
Earlier in his career I'd say he was a lot better.
He was also known for massive investments into wind farms, divesting his petroleum portfolio, and rallying fellow conservatives to take climate change seriously.
You admit you’ve never heard of him, then read Wikipedia, and feel sufficiently armed with the knowledge required to self-righteously proclaim judgement on the life of another human being.
"Stay fit. You don’t want to get old and feel bad. You’ll also get a lot more accomplished and feel better about yourself if you stay fit. I didn’t make it to 91 by neglecting my health."
It's a good final letter and has good advice. Complicated guy, complicated legacy, but good advice.