teawrecks

I’m arguing that it’s almost tautologically true that if those events could happen, then my position holds water. I’m only arguing that it’s within the bounds of the possible.

But I think we're still talking past each other. Imagine a contrived situation where people are picking apples, and each have their own basket they're collecting them in, and their own strategy for collecting them. I'm saying that person A's strategy will never result in them having the most apples, and to me it sounds like you're saying "well if they happen upon a secret trove of apples, then they would have the most apples". Which, yeah, you're right, but that's not my point.

Or like how the optimal strategy to the Secretary Problem is to search ~37% of applicants without accepting, and then take the first one that is better than all of them. No, you're not guaranteed to accept the best applicant, but it's still provably the best strategy for any random set of applicants.

Seems pretty easy to maintain your wealth that way. Am I missing something there?

You would not remain the richest person in the world with that strategy, any other strategy that gains more than 2%/yr would overtake you.

Edit: I probably am moving goal posts here at this point, but you are helping me refine what it is I'm actually trying to say. I agree that ethical behavior could theoretically result in the most profits, but I'm also convinced that it is not even close to the winning strategy in our current society.

If you truly, in your wildest imagination, can’t think of a single way, no matter how extremely and unbelievably unlikely, that someone could become the wealthiest person on earth without exploiting the labor of others, I’m happy to agree to disagree on the issue.

So wouldn't you be relying on the unfalsifyability of your claim? Reminds me of Russell's Teapot. Your claim is that there is a vanishingly small, yet unprovably non-zero chance of something being true, therefore your claim must be true. I'm ok with conceding that.

But it seems like that’s more a lack of imagination on your part than anything.

I never said I was imaginative :D

Hell, here’s a simple one. Elon Musk decides to will his entire fortune to a random stranger drawn by lottery, you end up winning, and then he dies. Congrats, you’re now the richest person on earth. Did you exploit someone’s labor to get that money?

That's the lottery example again. It sounds like we both agree it was accrued unethically, but would you agree that for such a person who is handed that wealth to maintain it, they would need to behave unethically?

All money on earth has at some point belonged to someone who did, and I’m not culpable because the $20 bill in my wallet was once probably owned by Jeff Bezos (or, you know, someone who’s dead and evil). Are you now responsible for every ill thing that Elon Musk has done because you won his death lottery?

Slippery slope?

Pretty sure it comes from America Automobile Associations.

Instructions unclear, toes sticking out front of shoes.

I assume you're going for the "is it impossible, or just highly improbable" route again. Is the musician example intended to be something that is possible? Do you think that example is possible? I think that even healthy, sustainable competition would prevent that example from ever happening. Which is part of the point: if you only have ethically run businesses, you'll always have healthy competition, and thus none of them can ever reach such an absurd amount of wealth over the others.

But let's say you're an unethical multi billion dollar corporation in the music industry whose bottom line is being impacted, and you're willing to do whatever to get part of that. Let me ask you, what would you do to get your piece of the pie? Feel free to just look around for inspiration :(. You'd likely start by offering to buy them out. If they refuse you have several options: creating a copycat that sounds similar, but pump out 10x more tracks to flood the market, pay off all "radio stations" (whatever companies you pay to stream music in random stores and clubs, etc) to prioritize your music, pay SEO professionals to ensure your products appear before yours, pay lawyers to find something to litigate over to stun your ability to make any more music. Someone who is actually in the music industry could probably come up with better ideas than me, but the point is, a company willing and allowed to play unethically will always beat out the ones that aren't.

I certainly think it’s possible to become the richest man on earth through purely ethical means.

Maybe in general, but it's impossible in our current late-stage capitalist society.

What about that scenario is strictly impossible?

Because anyone who tries to do it would be quickly usurped by someone else willing to be unethical.

Yeah, I know it sounds like a goal post movement, but I didn't make the original claim, and in fact thought the original claim was oversimplified, but that there was a truth to it. I think that in order to best illustrate that truth, "billion" had to be removed as it was a red herring.

And yeah the first half of it sounds like I'm setting a variable X, where X makes me right, but the fact that such an X exists is the point I'm making. If you agree then we're on the same page. The alternate claim would be that it's possible in our late stage capitalist society to be the richest person using purely ethical, non-exploitative means, which I don't believe is possible. And for a value of X=a billion, I think it's just very unlikely.

I've never run Debian, but I did use Fedora on a laptop with Gnome for several years and it was rock solid.

I think there is a slightly different claim we're each making, and it's confused by the term "billion". I think we both agree that it's an arbitrary value that was used in the interest of an oversimplified claim above, but I think we can disambiguate the points we're making if we generalize it.

Your statement that "it is possible to be an X-aire without exploitation of the working class" is technically correct for the value of X=billion.

But I think the claim I'm making (and the oversimplified claim that was originally made) is that: for any given point in time, in any given capitalist society, there is a value X beyond which you cannot reliably amass and retain wealth without unethical exploitation.

The post above set X at a billion, maybe it's not a billion, maybe it's 100 billion. 100 years ago maybe it was 100 million, and in 100 years it'll be 100 trillion. But the point is that there exists a value beyond which ONLY exploitative practices can get you; or in other words, you will never be the richest man in our late-stage capitalist society by winning the lottery or through steady, ethical investments.

Heh Canonical is a funny example, considering most Linux users steer clear of it because of it's arguably exploitative practices in an effort to remain profitable.

I do think most, if not all billionaires have convinced themselves the ends justify their means. Zuck thinks he's "connecting the world". Bezos probably thinks the same thing Sam Walton did. Musk thinks he's ushering in the next stage of humanity. On some level I'm sympathetic to Ubuntu's cause; all tech companies harvest your data for profit, why not leverage that technique in order to bootstrap the prevalence of a FOSS platform.

But the point is, that's just what has to happen to amass that level of wealth in the society we live in. You can be as noble as you want, you can get lucky and find yourself in a pile of cash, but to steadily climb that ladder to the billion+ territory will require you to exploit or be exploited.

I just looked at the list of the top ten billionaires. It includes: Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook (one hit wonder) Jeff Bezos: Amazon (one hit wonder) Bill Gates: Microsoft (one hit wonder) Larry Page: Google (one hit wonder)

Not a single one of these hit billionaire status via a one-hit-wonder. Every single one of them did so via a pattern of exploitation.

Sure, some of them might have had a one-hit-wonder that resulted in their first few million. But to keep climbing past a billion required steady, consistent, methodical, unethical exploitation and anti-competative practices. These are the poster-children for exploitative billionaires in our society.

You say that a small business can't grow to be a multi-billion dollar business? Tell that to literally any of the above.

I didn't say that. I said that (the overwhelming majority of) small businesses cannot become a billionaire company without a pattern of exploitation.

the only point I'm making is that it's in fact possible to become a billionaire without exploiting other people's labor...If we agree on that point, then we are fully in agreement.

Sure, it's theoretically possible. But that might account for less than 1% of currently living billionaires, if any at all. Do we agree?

You're not describing a situation where your made a series of investments with a high ROI, you're describing a "one-hit-wonder" scenario. Ask any successful game developer and they'll all (sorry, the overwhelming majority will) tell you that making a viral game as you've described is hugely luck-based.

Similarly, all (sorry, the overwhelming majority) of those 3000 billionaires would agree that you don't amass their amount of wealth via a one-hit-wonder. Yes, it involves the fortune of having the opportunity to exploit others (usually born to already wealthy families), but then also requires a pattern of exploitation (I think they'll be less willing to admit that one. Maybe Theil would.)

If you'd like to adjust your hypothetical scenario to not be based off of a one-hit-wonder, and instead model a sustainable pattern of good investments, go for it. But I believe I've already addressed that possibility with my "small business" example in the previous post. It simply doesn't happen.

Yes, anything that turns a profit is based on a supply/demand gap, the key word I used was "unsustainablely". I'm not talking about selling a video game for $100 when players want to pay $20, I'm talking about selling the cure for a disease for $10000 when it costs $1 to make. Price gouging. Exploitation.