Hacker News Reader

Comment by senordevnyc | Hacker News Reader

I understand the anger, but do you really want to live in the world of anarchy that would be required for these people to starve? Because if the billionaires are starving, the rest of us are long gone at that point.

View on HN

"Letting them starve" is clearly rhetorical shorthand for not giving their businesses money. It's based on the irony of the power imbalance, none of these people will ever starve if their businesses fail. Nobody thinks they're going to starve, nobody was intended to take away that literal interpretation, how could you possibly think this interpretation was intended or is worth discussing.

I guess I was thrown off by “let them starve, the way they want us to”. Doesn’t make much sense if you’re using “starve” to mean totally different things.

Even then, it’s nonsensical to think that you’re going to “starve” these companies of revenue, companies that are growing faster than any in history, bringing in trillions in revenue, and have appreciable fractions of our entire species using them daily.

To be fair, to them, starving is "other people aren't spending their money on me". Remember Emlo sued people who stopped advertising on his personal blog when he let the Nazis back in.

anarchy isn't required for them to starve. these people could be jailed and their assets frozen, for example, and their jail food would then be stolen by the more physically intimidating inmates. regardless of your political opinions on the subject, this is a perfectly cromulent scenario that includes them starving without there being anarchy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com