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Comment by generalpass | Hacker News Reader

My guess is that it was a forced buyout? The terms of which are always painful for the forcers.

As far as the employees go, anyone working for a company clearly not making any money needs to move along. Whatever consequences you suffer are at your own risk.

And as far as what this might look like under socialism, the government would take money from people who have nothing to do with any of it and give it to all of the people involved in order to maintain an organization that nobody wants to do business with.

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on the one hand, yes: folks worked for a company that lost money. So some of this is on them. However, I strongly suspect that the risk was not in any way clearly communicated to them. And you're ignoring the fact that they clearly have the resources to pay the founder another $600m or so.

> And as far as what this might look like under socialism,

“Late stage capitalism” and “socialism” is a false dilemma. We can see the known, evil effects of late-stage capitalism, and it is appropriate to pin the blame on the systems which encourage this behavior even while acknowledging the benefits of those systems and while holding accountable actors within these systems.

This really has nothing to do with socialism.

"Late state capitalism" is a Marxist term.

It was coined by Werner Sombart, who was not a Marxist but rather a classical economics professor in Germany.

Geez, even the Wikipedia article on the term states that is Marxist. I think you are substituting "Marxist" with "as written by Marx."

Werner Sombart was heavily influenced by Marx. Regardless of how you want to view him. Read his entry on Wikipedia.

"Sombart, at that time, was an important Marxian, someone who used and interpreted Karl Marx — to the point that Friedrich Engels said he was the only German professor who understood Das Kapital. Sombart called himself a "convinced Marxist,"[1] but later wrote that "It had to be admitted in the end that Marx had made mistakes on many points of importance."

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