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Comment by mdszy | Hacker News Reader

Maybe if they weren't leeches on society it'd be easier to want technology like this to exist.

But as it stands, there's no reason to believe it won't just be used as a way to make the rich even richer by letting them live forever.

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What do rich people leech and from who?

If you think someone can become worth tens or hundreds of billions of dollars without exploiting anyone then boy howdy do I have news for you.

You do know that it is possible to create value? For example, let's say I invent a pill that increases the average life span of a human by 5 years. It costs 1$ to make and I sell it to every person on earth for 4$ each. Who is exploited in this example?

Clearly you should be selling that drug for $1 you capitalist pig.

Inventing the pill is not the only labor that goes into making it. Was every worker who manufactured that drug also fairly compensated for their labor? Or were they exploited in the name of keeping labor costs down?

Inventing something doesn't magically sprout it into existence.

The person who invented the pill does not deserve thousands upon thousands of times more reward than those whose labor goes into producing it.

If you legitimately believe that billionares have worked thousands or hundreds-of-thousands times harder, or are that much smarter, than you or me, then that's just some ultimate self-hatred right there.

I don't mean to sound obtuse. I've heard this claim many times and I can imagine it being true, but I have no way of knowing whether it is or not. So I wanted to see what the reasoning is.

The fact that there are millions of workers who are being exploited constantly in order to produce things or provide labor in ways for which they're not being fairly compensated? I mean the most obvious example of this is how minimum wage is well under the poverty line and there are folks out there still being paid it and expected to live off of it.

How do you know if someone is being fairly compensated? My stance is that a market is likely to produce more accurate prices than any individual could, but maybe you disagree. It's true that minimum wage is very low, but it should be the job of the government to support people who aren't compensated enough to support themselves.

Okay, we can talk all day about the "should"s but the fact stands that almost everything that has brought any individual to billionaire status in today's world was the result of exploitation.

I don't understand what should be done then. If the government isn't capable of providing that kind of help, then surely it isn't capable of eliminating all billionaires?

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