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Comment by stonogo | Hacker News Reader

They are hoarding wealth. They do have Scrooge McDuck cash vaults. (Look for them under "real estate holdings" as a starting place.)

The fact is they have enough money to have Scrooge McDuck cash vaults AND ALSO invest a shitload of money.

History also shows us that sooner or later, unbounded wealth disparity ends poorly for the wealthy. I hope we can find a way forward without that "solution" happening here.

You can have big business without robber barons. I'm not sure that exploitation is a necessity to produce things like chat bots, even really good chatbots. Pretending that these people are not hoarding wealth is not really going to answer the question, though.

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> "real estate holdings"

Real estate is not cash. It's cash spent.

> History also shows us that sooner or later, unbounded wealth disparity ends poorly for the wealthy.

History also shows us that societies without wealth disparity end up poorly for everyone. As in starving.

> You can have big business without robber barons.

Excellent. Go ahead and build one, compete and put Scrooge McDuck out of business.

>Real estate is not cash. It's cash spent. But it is hoarding wealth.

> societies without wealth disparity end up poorly for everyone. As in starving.

If this is meant to be a reference to Soviet-style communism, then all that shows is that centrally planned economies run by dictators end up poorly for everyone.

They don't end up without wealth disparity, though. In fact, USSR had the highest wealth disparity at "peak communism" under Stalin, when well-off party bureaucrats and high-ranking professionals hired housemaids - openly and legally - to clean their large apartments and dachas, while attending high school required paying money.

Another way to think about it is that USSR was a society in which capital was still controlled by a small elite, but collectively as a corporation (the Party). A particular apparatchik would be living much better than the average worker for ultimately the same reasons - because his lifestyle was financed by wealth produced by other people who did not have the claim to the wealth they produced under the law. But he didn't own his cars and his dachas personally; he merely used them so long as he retained his rank within the Party (which for many people could be a lifetime thing in practice, purges aside).

It's all communist societies. For voluntary communes, they usually break up once they discover they cannot feed themselves.

Citation needed.

Sure.

Both Jamestown and Plymouth colonies started out with communal agriculture, and starved. The Plymouth colony switched to private farms after the first year, and then prospered. The Jamestown colony failed. The San Francisco Summer of Love lasted, well, one summer, and then collapsed. The Seattle CHAZ lasted 6 weeks. The Woodstock commune lasted 3 days, then left the fields completely covered in trash and poo for others to clean up.

Find a commune that has lasted more than a handful of years. The Israeli kibbutzen don't count because they feed themselves from a government subsidy.

But hey, you don't have to listen to me. Communes in the US are perfectly legal (20,000 of them have been tried). You're free to start one with your friends. Please keep us posted how it goes!

Think about what you wrote, it doesn't make sense even at the first glance. Millions of Americans have a yearly income in excess of $1million, for those people, employing house staff is a trivial expense.

And these people aren't even considered 'rich' by the standards of truly rich people.

True, the Soviet elite, like any elite ever, had great resources at its finger tips, and high ranking bureaucrats had access to perks like luxury resorts reserved for Party officials, better cars and luxury housing, I'm pretty sure no one had the excess wealth of having a hundred million dollar yacht (or equivalent), that today's billionaires (including Russian oligarchs) have.

Edit: I'm not allowed to respond to you, probably some anti-flamewar mechanism (and downvote you, which you obviously did to me), so let my answer stand here.

You wrote:

>USSR had the highest wealth disparity at "peak communism" under Stalin

then in when I refuted your post, you replied:

>Was said inequality less than in capitalist societies? Sure

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Mine was that USSR had blatant and obvious wealth disparity, and so "societies without wealth disparity end up poorly for everyone", as OP wrote, doesn't actually describe any existing society. Was said inequality less than in capitalist societies? Sure. But people were most certainly not equal in day to day quality of life, and in fact the more rabidly totalitarian that society was, the less actual equality it had.

And yes, there was one unique way in which Soviets actually had more stratification than pretty much any capitalist society: access to some things (like special stores with imported goods) was gated not on money, but solely on official position of oneself or a family member. Thus some stuff that was nominally well within the range of what the average worker could afford with some saving was in practice just not for sale to the proles, period. In that sense, it was more reminiscent of those feudal societies in which one's social class determined e.g. what color and material one could use for their clothing.

What I wrote means that USSR had its highest wealth disparity under Stalin (i.e. "peak communism" as usually claimed by both tankies and ancaps). Not that it was the highest wealth disparity in human history; that is so obviously not the case, it hasn't even occurred to me that someone might misread it like that.

And I did not downvote your post. Please don't make so many uncharitable assumptions if you genuinely wish a discussion.

> Real estate is not cash. It's cash spent.

No, it's an asset only barely less liquid than cash, generally deliberately shelved in a holding company for the exact purpose of hoarding wealth. You have fallen for the bullshit.

> History also shows us that societies without wealth disparity end up poorly for everyone. As in starving.

You left out "unbounded." Deliberate misinterpretation or failure to comprehend? We'll never know. Wealth disparity will always exist. Unbounded wealth disparity is a symptom of a corruptable system.

> Excellent. Go ahead and build one, compete and put Scrooge McDuck out of business.

I already have built one, and I'm quite comfortable, thanks. Putting competitors out of business isn't part of the game plan for sustainable success. Unbounded growth doesn't benefit me past meeting my financial goals. You've once again missed the entire point of my post.

> it's an asset only barely less liquid than cash

Have you ever tried to sell real estate? I have. It's nothing like the liquidity of cash. Cash I can spend right now. Real estate? It can be 6 months or more. Even borrowing against the equity takes a while. You have to spend time at the bank, get appraisals, get credit checks, and spend an afternoon at the escrow office reading 100 odd pages of contracts. Bleh.

> Unbounded wealth disparity is a symptom of a corruptable system.

A brief study of various societies will show that wealth disparity is hardly a key ingredient for corruption. Corruption in 3rd world countries, for example, is rampant at every income level. When the only way to get ahead is through corruption, you're going to get a heluva lot of it. The USSR ran on corruption at all levels. There are many books on the Soviet economy.

> Unbounded growth doesn't benefit me past meeting my financial goals

Why does that entitle you to decide what the goals should be for everyone else? What if they decide your business is too big, and you should get a haircut? Setting the maximum for wealth being what you have seems a bit convenient?

Elon Musk is the wealthiest man in the world. With his wealth he was able to start SpaceX. Would we be better off without SpaceX? Musk was also the primary investor in Tesla. He bet his entire fortune on it. Your proposal would have prevented that.

You're missing the holding company. I'm not going to teach you real estate as an asset-parking mechanism; there are plenty of articles about it you can find if you Google it instead of arguing with me about a topic you're clearly not familiar with. Here's a hint: the ownership of the property does not change. Only the holding company is modified, if even that.

Once again you're ignoring the word "unbounded." I guess we can know whether it's deliberate misinterpretation, after all.

My own agency as a human entitles me to have opinions what is or is not appropriate behavior. Your counterarguments to this are not even specious, just uninteresting scare tactics. For instance, who the hell is 'they'? It doesn't matter, because I don't have to justify the fact that I have opinions.

Humanity would be unquestionably better off without SpaceX; it's a pollution factory with a byproduct of further enriching its owner by literally setting precious resources on fire. I am not particularly impressed with Tesla's products, but at least it's not a pointless boondoggle like SpaceX. Your definition of success is apparently based entirely on financial gain, which is a bizarre starting point from which to map out an ethos.

I'm done engaging with this thread, as I no longer consider it possible that you're engaging in good faith. Good luck with your future endeavors.

> For instance, who the hell is 'they'?

That's just being argumentative.

> Humanity would be unquestionably better off without SpaceX

Yes, it's much better to have 10x more expensive rockets.

> Your definition of success is apparently based entirely on financial gain

Financial gain due to providing people with the things they want at a price they are willing to pay.

>unbounded wealth disparity ends poorly for the wealthy. I hope we can find a way forward without that "solution" happening here.

Historically there have been swings in inequality. It can just lead to people voting in left wing governments who tax the rich a lot.

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