beaconstudios

has Thiel ever specifically claimed to be a monarchist? not that I'm aware of - but he has close ties with Curtis Yarvin who is a technocratic monarchist, has explicitly expressed anti-democratic sentiment, and hangs around in a mixed crowd of paleolibertarians (a system which leads directly to the sort of hyper-capitalist corporate monarchies Yarvin yearns for) and crypto-fascists like Trump. His behaviour, the company he keeps and his stated beliefs all point to him being a reactionary.

then what was your objection? Capitalism incentivises profiteering, the crypto industry is an example of practically pure profiteering.

Capitalism isn't an idea, it's a system that we live within.

Yes, if you care about blame then you can just blame people for bad actions and call it a day. But if you care about actually preventing bad actions then you need to look at incentives, and that's where the study of political economy comes in.

it's a descriptive take on capitalism. profit is the motivating force for businesses, and in the crypto economy the profit is primarily derived from speculation and scamming. in the real world, at least capitalism is driven by demand that often comes from actual utility. crypto is like if the entire economy was wall street, including boiler rooms and market manipulation.

crypto is just purely distilled capitalism. Of course it's not going to solve any problems - it's an ecosystem entirely dedicated to the pursuit of profit, without the inconvenient side effects of actually producing useful work.

yes. A country is a series of lines on a map.

also did you mean to imply that culture is essentially tied to ethnicity? because it isn't.

There's quite a few dogwhistlers here for sure but I'd say it's availability bias - people comment more on threads about things they care about. Id say the community skews libertarian, not far right.

Yes, it's still the same country. And nobody's being replaced if the Japanese are reproducing at lower than replacement rate.

sounds like you just don't like the project - I wouldn't read too much into it. If it becomes a trend of "new ecosystem = burnout" then I'd start to consider a specific cause.

I think everybody is just stuck renting and can't get on the property ladder.

They only ever use these things as set dressing from what I've seen - you could substitute Proust for any overly high-minded literature, the centurion is just being pedantic about the graffiti and so on.

Just not in the places where you can actually make six figures!

Is the US government really that bad? I hear Americans complain about it all the time but from my experience in the UK the government is mostly competent most of the time.

It's mostly just silly, there are some British cultural references but it's not classics except Holy Grail being a long reference to the Arthurian legend.

Typically people mean something that people engage with it not for its own merit, but to cultivate an image. So, people acting like Stanley Parable is great to look like they have depth of taste because on the surface it's not that great a game.

Of course it could be that you genuinely enjoy artsy comedic narrative games, which I'm sure is usually the case.

It's perfectly principled to take your cash and then walk away.

For starters, not everybody in a coop has to earn the same amount or get the same payouut from a sale. They just all need voting rights. The point of cooperatives is to be owned by all their members, not just the founders.

Second, yes the profit in the marketplace is still exploitative to a degree, but we don't have a viable alternative so there's not much to do about that. I don't believe there's much point critiquing something when there's no alternative.

I think voting with your feet only works in theory, because Amazon is well known to engage in abusive employment practices (including according to workers) and yet has a great number of warehouse and delivery staff and its founder is the second (?) richest man on earth. Many low paying jobs have high turnover rates because they can just use people up until they quit (if they even have that option) and then bring in an unemployed person. They have to incentive to treat their employees with decency.

These are valid concerns to raise, but can be addressed. In actuality, the investors (which can also be the owners but not necessarily) provide the company with capital to purchase these planes. That, or the company uses its own profits to do so. Either way, the money is the property of the company, not the owners.

In the former (investor) case the payment can be structured as a loan, and/or investors can become stakeholders as part of a multi-stakeholder cooperative, with their own cut of the earnings. In the latter case it's no issue because the company is buying things with its own resources.

In my experience (having implemented React SSR a few times for different companies) it's usually applied halfway between the two, on simpler form-driven websites - process-driven screens, marketplaces, the kind of places where you want either the performance improvement of a prerender or the SEO friendliness.

> Do you think founders should retain ownership of the companies they create?

No. The idea that a company is something you "own" rather than a group of people doing some kind of economic activity is a social construct, and one designed to disenfranchise the people doing the ongoing work. A company is a collection of assets and people - to own assets makes sense, to own other people's labour in an ongoing capacity does not.

> On what basis do you think he should have been compelled to sell his stake in the company he created?

I don't think he should - I think we should change the system that allows people to be worth billions off the backs of others. I don't want redistribution, I want reform.

I think that an organisation is just a group of people and just like in our countries, we should be able to make our voices heard democratically. I think we should aim to make more areas of our lives democratic, including our workplaces where we spend much of our lives.

So yeah, I think you should have a voice in how the company you work for is run.

Depends on who you ask - I'm fine with it and haven't said otherwise. What is a problem is when one person profits off the work of another (as in, pays them less than their fair share), which is basically all salaried employment.

If by that you mean we have different understandings of the word "exploitation" then sure thing. But my definition is the dictionary one:

https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/exploita...

> the act of using someone unfairly for your own advantage

But we probably just disagree on the meaning of "unfairly" within that definition.

A founder-operator has two roles in the company - as owner, being the founder and thus a shareholder, and as director or whatever work role they have. I only take issue with the former part as I think people should have a say in how the company they are a part of is run. Directorship is still a skilled job that should be compensated thusly.

Infinity, if they're not exploiting people, by definition. If WhatsApp was a coop and still sold to Facebook for billions, they wouldn't be exploited.

Exploitation isn't when somebody is forced to do something, it's when one person profits off the work of another. So in my example, the job is exploitative, yes. Having a business fail is not exploitation.

I didn't make an argument about whether it was contributing to the economy or not, but that doesn't matter - slavery contributed to the economy too, but it's also morally wrong.

It's a stripped down hypothetical on purpose, to get to the heart of the question. Non-labour material concerns are left as an exercise for the reader.

So what you're describing is the work of a director - work that should be paid but that I intentionally excluded from my example because a lot of people just think by default that directors should "own" the company because that's the status quo.

I still think that directors should be well compensated commensurate with their capability and role. I just think that they shouldn't be able to exclusively control and take the profits generated by the work of everybody involved. Corporations are autocratic or oligarchic in that way - this leads to the select few that society seems worthy of profit control having more power in our society. This is because the owners can keep workers' wages as low as the market will sustain while inflating their own total compensation to absurd proportions, as we've seen. With a cooperative structure everybody involved has a stake in controlling the company, so executives have to take everybody's needs including the workers, into account, instead of just looking out for themselves and investors.

As for where the exploitation comes in - it probably comes down to different perspectives on the word. To me, it's exploitation if one person is profiting off the labour of another. Of course in a company the shareholders are often also working, but if a company grows to a billion dollars from a million its not because the directors are working 100x harder.

I mean free choice as in they decided unprompted. It's still a free choice in terms of free will either way - I'm not sure what the better term would be. Unprompted I guess.

I understand what they meant though: paying celebrities to join while giving people the impression that those celebrities joined by free choice* (ie because the platform was so great).

* edit: free choice as in "not swayed by payment"