Yes, and the art of this game is to extract value which you did not create. It may or may not come alongside creating value. Uber creates value in the form of an app marketplace for taxis, but it also pushes taxi wages down below the sustainability line without pushing prices down that far, and pockets the difference for itself. Apple made a cool phone that it sells for a high but fair price, but it also takes 30% of everything you buy with that phone, just because it can.
> the art of this game is to extract value which you did not create
in common parlance, theft
Accepting money from willing customers, who are paying you for access to some technology you created that they find valuable, is not theft. Quite the opposite, it's almost always two happy parties engaging in an exchange that each of them finds advantageous.
> Quite the opposite, it's almost always two very happy parties engaging in an exchange that each of them finds advantageous.
When I buy an iPhone from Apple, I suspect quite a few folks in the mines, factories, shipping, and retail chain that gets those "two happy parties" connected aren't so happy.
They are, however, deeply important to the transaction.
> I suspect quite a few folks in the mines, factories, shipping, and retail chain that gets those "two happy parties" connected aren't so happy.
Okay, if you're going to make such a claim and trust in it, then can I presume you have answers to these two questions?
1. In a world without Apple, what would these people be doing that would make them happier?
2. What exactly is stopping them from doing that now?
> What exactly is stopping them from doing that now?
I think the rise of China demonstrates they're certainly trying.
1. Not being forced to work in the cobalt mines, I suspect.
2. Economic coercion. The people are forced by the capitalist system - that was shaped by capitalist interests - to participate in a system they don't have any say in. They cannot even opt out.
1. You didn't answer the question. You said what they wouldn't be doing. What would they be doing that would be making them happier?
2. You didn't answer this question either. What specifically is stopping them from opting out? Who is putting a gun to their head and saying they can't live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle or be a subsistence farmer?
The answer is nothing. People are largely making these choices themselves, because they're better options, for reasons that are obvious to anyone who's read a bit of history.
Are you familiar at all with how China has "encouraged" people from farming communities to work in factories?
And this wouldn't be happening if Apple didn't exist? This is a problem created by capitalist companies, not authoritarian communist governments?
Capitalists make use of authoritarian governments. They go hand in hand.
What do you think slavery is?
Um, the police will put a gun to your head if you're homeless. To not be homeless you can build on your land or someone else's land. If you build on someone else's land the police puts a gun to your head. To own land you need to participate in the system, and then after a whole lifetime working the cobalt mines the system might just let you get a section of property by the time you die if you're lucky.
Very well put, thank you.
1. Maybe living as hunter-gatherers would make them happier.
2. You can't live as a hunter-gatherers because the land has been enclosed and privatized.
There's no choice involved here. Your - and my - freedoms have been taken away a long time ago.
They are working for money, often in jobs paying more than others in their local economy, when they otherwise wouldn't be.
It’s still exploitative.
The point is that the “gains” are overwhelmingly absorbed by the top.
There’s no reason they couldn’t pay them a much bigger share of the profits and raise up that entire part of the world.
But yet, they don’t. Because that would cost them some of their own wealth.
I’m not even saying it should be equally distributed. The disparity is insane right now though.
> There’s no reason they couldn’t pay them a much bigger share...
Why should they pay more than market worth? When you go shop at a store, do you pay double the price tag just because you can? No, you don't, because that would cost you more of your wealth.
Does the average person in a first-world country donate half their wealth to the average person in a second-world countries? Does the average person in a second world country donate half their wealth to the average person in a third world country? No, and no. It's not really a common thing in human nature to give up a lot of what we have in order to support those who are less fortunate. You might say that's sad, but imo it's still a fact.
What is curious about human nature is how, despite this lack of behavior on our own part, we expect those who have more than us to give us what they have.
Market wages and prices are fairly set, largely due to supply and demand.
> The disparity is insane right now though
The disparity is better than ever imo. I'd rather live in this time period than any other, thanks to technology, which is a great equalizer. It provides amazing quality of life improvements across so many areas, from education and healthcare to entertainment and food; then capitalistic competition absolutely demolishes the costs of this tech, to the point where prohibitively expensive tech becomes affordable to billions.
Today, a middle class person can eat a cheeseburger that's just as good as what Bill Gates is eating, drive a car that's 99% as good as his, travel to the same places he travels to, wear clothes that are just as good as his, read the same books, watch movies, listen to the same music, go to the same plays, etc. The rich sit in slightly bigger chairs, enjoy slightly shorter waits, and many other improvements that historically would've been considered negligible compared to the gaps between kings and peasants, nobility and servants, owners and slaves, rich and poor.
In fact, the richest are having to resort to paying insane prices for useless luxury goods and brand names just to differentiate themselves. Or paying outrageous sums for luxury toys like yachts and planes that most wouldn't even want.
Exactly, thank you. I can't believe how many people like this there are on a forum that's ostensibly about startups, but I suppose HN has long since stopped being about startups now.
I'm genuinely curious whether HN's political turn represents generational turnover or a small group of vocal agitators. The anti-car faction I can safely say is the latter, the anti-billionaire people I'm not sure about.
I've been on HN for a long time, before this account on other anonymous ones. It certainly seemed that in the 2010s there was a more hopeful undercurrent of startup activity, even as external events like Occupy Wall Street happened, but that wasn't as big on HN as e.g. Reddit, but now it seems like people have brought that energy to HN in more numbers, even if some have stayed the same as the sibling says.
Some even have specific agendas as evidenced by their submission history and comments which all seem to follow specific biases too.
My account's from 2010.
What if HN hasn't taken a political turn? What if politics took a giant turn, and HN is roughly the same as it was?
The entire reason I disagree with the way wealth is shared is because I workedi n startups for years.
I worked my balls off to make millions for CEO founders and other asshole investors and only got a pittance of the wealth that they made off my work.
You agreed to this when you signed up, maybe you should have negotiated more equity instead or went to some other company or started your own company which is the risk (and reward) those founders took. Sounds like many in this thread just have a sort of spilled milk viewpoint. No one forced you to work for these startups.
> You agreed to this when you signed up
Have you ever actually worked in a start up?
That's not how it works. You can negotiate whatever you want. The deal can still change out form under you as new investors come on.
Not to mention, you're negotiating from a point of information asymmetry. They know way more about their plans for the company than you do and will often tell you what you want to hear rather than the truth. You can make some attempts at discerning if they're being honest or not, but ultimately you're left to just make a guess.
They also enter the negotiation from a strong position economically. They aren't going to miss a rent payment without a Job. The company itself may be fucked if they can't hire, but not the investors/founders.
So the negotiation is inherently unfair from the start.
> Sounds like many in this thread just have a sort of spilled milk viewpoint. No one forced you to work for these startups.
This is not relevant to whether their actions were moral, ethical or fair.
> Have you ever actually worked in a start up?
Yes, many in fact. We negotiated the terms up front and if I didn't like them then I went with another offering company. I never had deals change from under me, maybe you're some Eduardo Saverin but I'm not. That you got screwed for not doing your due diligence doesn't mean everyone does. I'm not sure what is immoral, unethical, or unfair about that when again no one is forcing you to work at any particular company or even startups, or even in the tech industry. There are lots of jobs you can do.
> I never had deals change from under me
I sincerely doubt this. If your start up went through a funding round, the deal changed.
> That you got screwed for not doing your due diligence doesn't mean everyone does.
“Due diligence” is impossible because the negotiation is asymmetrical. You can’t know what their actual exit plan is. You can’t know what their financials look like. You can ask. They can lie.
> I'm not sure what is immoral, unethical, or unfair about that when again no one is forcing you to work at any particular company
No one forced people to invest in Enron. I guess it was ethical. No one was forced to invest were Bernie Madoff. I guess it was ethical.
Just because you aren’t forced to invest your time/money somewhere doesn’t mean they can’t take advantage of you
You can "sincerely doubt" it all you want, doesn't make my experience false. Again just because you got screwed doesn't mean others are, how many millionaires has SpaceX minted last week? In a startup it is the exception to have experiences like yours, the norm is that they make some, but probably not much, from a startup because most startups don't go anywhere.
> No one forced people to invest in Enron. I guess it was ethical. No one was forced to invest were Bernie Madoff. I guess it was ethical.
Yes, there was nothing unethical about being an investor in these, sometimes you cannot predict what a company will do but that doesn't make you an unethical investor unlike investing in say weapons manufacturers.
You can ask about all of these things during negotiations, and an increasingly large share of people do. I'm grateful for LLMs, because they're making people much better and more knowledgeable negotiators.
Ultimately it's possible to get screwed, but you can also choose not to work at startups and get a traditional job with less risk.
And the existence of some bad actors and screwy deals in the startup community is not really valid commentary on the greater picture of "the way wealth is shared." That was one way that wealth was shared, at one company, in one industry, with one or several bad actors.
> That was one way that wealth was shared, at one company, in one industry, with one or several bad actors.
Except it's not. It's the norm not the exception. It's pervasive through the industry, and YC and pg have done it themselves to multiple companies.
Hence why it was literally turned into a meme plot on a TV show.
You also ignored the bit about the negotiation being inherently unfair from the get go. And again, the deal can (and almost assuredly will) change out from under you because of the structure of the company which isn't really up for negotiation.
I disagree, and I've never seen any stats to support your belief that people getting screwed is the norm. But I've seen many, many stats of new startups minting millionaires.
> I'm grateful for LLMs, because they're making people much better and more knowledgeable negotiators.
Just to be clear, we're talking about the same LLMs that were recently silently tuned to kneecap competitors? https://www.wired.com/story/anthropic-responds-to-backlash-o...
Not sure what that has to do with LLMs helping individuals. Even if you don't trust American ones, there are other open weight ones.
> Why should they pay more than market worth?
That's the whole moral and ethical difference. Paying them their market worth is the minimum. The entire argument is that when something is wildly successful, that success should be shared with everyone. Not necessarily equally, but not as insanely disparate as it is today.
> When you go shop at a store, do you pay double the price tag just because you can? No, you don't, because that would cost you more of your wealth.
I'm not sure if you're aware, but your delivery driver is not an eggplant. There's a fundamental difference between a good you purchase and labor. One of those is an actual human being. For two, I and many others do choose where we shop based on how their employees are treated and how they get their goods. Ironically, it was literally the business model of Whole Foods before Amazon bought it and ruined it. For three, I'm not a billionaire. So what I do isn't remotely relevant to any part of this discussion.
> The disparity is better than ever imo. I'd rather live in this time period than any other, thanks to technology
The disparity is literally, mathematically, the worst it's ever been in human history. That doesn't mean I wouldn't rather live today than another tiem period. That's not even really an important question. The question is how do we make tomorrow even better. How do we allow more people to enjoy the riches that technology has granted us? Those are the real questions.
> What is curious about human nature is how, despite this lack of behavior on our own part, we expect those who have more than us to give us what they have.
Except that isn't true in the slightest. For one, it's a fundamental misunderstanding of the ask. The ask isn't that CEO should give everyone a bunch of money. The ask is that everyone who works at amazon should have more of an equity stake in the company and that likely means giving the CEO less equity. In amazon's case that would mean jeff gives less equity to himself in the early days and more to other workers (or you know.. a union that owns shares.......). I don't really agree that it's the same thing.
but even if we want to say that it is the same thing. I don't want anyone to give me shit. I'm relatively well off. I don't need more. I want the wealth to be shared with more people because there are a lot of people who aren't as well off as me. Also, my actions do reflect my values. It's just, I'm not a trillion dollar company so it's not that much impact.
> Today, a middle class person can eat a cheeseburger that's just as good as what Bill Gates is eating, drive a car that's 99% as good as his, travel to the same places he travels to, wear clothes that are just as good as his, read the same books, watch movies, listen to the same music, go to the same plays, etc.
Outside of music and movies, this isn't even remotely true. Even as someone that is on the very upper side of middle class, I can't eat at the same restaurants as Bill Gates. I'm literally not allowed. I can't buy the same clothes. They literally won't open the store for me. I can't see the same plays, tickets are near unobtainable without connections (not to mention the cost of traveling to venues). Not to mention, a big part of the problem, because of some of these ultra rich nerds, the middle class is smaller and smaller.
> That's the whole moral and ethical difference. Paying them their market worth is the minimum. The entire argument is that when something is wildly successful, that success should be shared with everyone. Not necessarily equally, but not as insanely disparate as it is today.
This system doesn't work because what people consider to be fair is completely subjective and arbitrary, and of course under a system like that, people with less money are going to just tell people with more money to give it to them. The only actual fair way to decide prices and wages is to let the market decide.
If you truly think that, based on your arbitrary, subjective, personal opinions, that founders should be sharing more wealth with employees, and that the market's pricing is unethically low, then what number would you choose? How do you choose that number exactly? What makes your choice for that number any better than anyone else's choice for that number?
And why don't you apply that thinking to other analogous walks of life, like charity, or taxes? How much of your income do you give to those less fortunate than you in this great project we call our country, or to people in other areas of the world? If you think our taxes are too low, how much extra tax do you pay voluntarily? What number is appropriate? At what point is it unethical?
There are plenty of billions of people who don't live in the first world who consider even a lower-class American to be living a luxurious, privileged life. America is a country built off the back of exploiting other countries. Are lower-class Americans not therefore unethical unless they donate much more to their even less fortunate counterparts in second- and third-world countries?
I don't think we're ever going to agree here, because a central part of your subjective opinion about what counts as ethical behavior is related to how much money/wealth/stuff some other other person has. Whereas that doesn't factor into my ethical belief system at all. At no point in my life have I ever cared how successful anyone else is, let alone wanted to tear them down or blame my problems on their success, nor expected them to give their money away to others according to my personal belief system.
It continues to boggle my mind that people care so much about others' success. It's almost the exact opposite of the teachings of pretty much every religion or book of wisdom ever created.
> The disparity is literally, mathematically, the worst it's ever been in human history.
This is an unprovable claim, an extreme claim, and almost certainly a false claim. It's also extremely subjective and depends entirely upon what metrics you choose to follow, most of which haven't been tracked for very long.
Worse, in my opinion, is that it's a popular a meme of an idea spread by politicians engaging in demagoguery, which has succeeded in getting people riled up in anger against their fellow citizens, as all demagoguery does. People are obsessed with the spending habits of their rich neighbors, but completely ignore the spending of the government -- the party actually responsible for the welfare of the people, which controls and wastes unimaginable sums of money.
I can't tell you how many people I met in San Francisco who believed wholeheartedly that the city should be taking more money from more people, but couldn't recount a single fact about how the city stewards and spends its budget.
> That doesn't mean I wouldn't rather live today than another time period. That's not even really an important question. The question is how do we make tomorrow even better. How do we allow more people to enjoy the riches that technology has granted us? Those are the real questions.
I agree with you about the real questions, but I disagree that the other question is important. I agree with you about the latter questions, but I disagree that the former question is unimportant. In the US, we have an entire generation of people on both the left and the right side of the political aisle who are being brainwashed into believing that things were so much better in the past, for two very different reasons. And it's causing us to blame and distrust social and economic mechanisms that have benefitted millions to an unimaginable degree.
We live in an era of unprecedented wealth creation, technological progress, extreme poverty elimination, and quality of life improvements, and people are literally clamoring to tear it all down because they keep being told that it used to be better. It's important to understand that no, it didn't. Your actual quality of life, the thing that mattered, would not have been better in the past, for the vast majority.
But again, I do agree with you that we should try to make tomorrow even better. The focus should be more on allowing more people to enjoy the riches that technology has granted us.
I just don't see the focus being directed that way. I see far more people discussing how to tear down the rich than how to help the poor. Far, far, far, far, far more people. There's a strong and popular perception that somehow doing the former will lead to the latter.
> Outside of music and movies, this isn't even remotely true. Even as someone that is on the very upper side of middle class, I can't eat at the same restaurants as Bill Gates. I'm literally not allowed. I can't buy the same clothes. They literally won't open the store for me. I can't see the same plays, tickets are near unobtainable without connections (not to mention the cost of traveling to venues).
I don't know what to say to this. By historical standards throughout all of human history, almost every human who ever existed would pretty much agree with me that the differences you point out are trivialities. If you zoom in on incremental 1% improvements, artificial scarcity, exclusivity, designer brands, and things like that, sure, maybe Bill Gates has a lot you don't. I'm sure he's eaten some fancy cheeseburger that you haven't. Maybe he's been in some exclusive room that you haven't. But if this is the level of inequality that we're complaining about, minuscule and artificial differences that would require an education in luxury goods/experiences to even notice, then I don't know what to tell you. How is that not a HUGE victory?
> Not to mention, a big part of the problem, because of some of these ultra rich nerds, the middle class is smaller and smaller.
What a disingenuous statistic! The only reason the middle class in America has shrunk is because the upper class has grown! We are literally moving in an upward direction, creating more and more wealth to more and more people!
It's genuinely depressing to see so many people disillusioned with the state of the country, because they're being barraged by a non-stop deluge of pessimistic messaging by demagogues telling them that everything is terrible, even when things are relatively great and trending in a better direction overall.
So well said. I appreciate you articulating this. I am relieved to see that there are others on here who understand the unbelievable privileges we have at this moment in time.
The demagogues have been shockingly effective at telling people that the size of the pie is fixed, the game is rigged, and the only way to get a piece of that limited pie is to steal it. And the people that are most susceptible to this message are the ones that live in the countries that people are literally dying to get in to.
>People are obsessed with the spending habits of their rich neighbors, but completely ignore the spending of the government -- the party actually responsible for the welfare of the people, which controls and wastes unimaginable sums of money.
While I believe the spending habits of the ultra wealthy should be monitored, it is astounding how people don't seem to pay any attention to the spending of the government. There are unfortunately many people taking advantage of the system, lining their pockets using funds for programs meant to help the people.
>It's genuinely depressing to see so many people disillusioned with the state of the country, because they're being barraged by a non-stop deluge of pessimistic messaging by demagogues telling them that everything is terrible, even when things are relatively great and trending in a better direction overall.
This is one point I really wish was more emphasized, in fact it should be taught to everyone in school. We are constantly being bombarded by negativity on the internet, even here on HN. I've noticed myself stepping away from here more often due to it, since I find myself and my thinking falling into a negative spiral from its influence.
However, when you take time to step back from the constant bombardment of negativity, you actually begin to better appreciate the blessings you have in life, and the opportunities present. Of course, there are problems and issues to be solved when it comes to our current system, but by taking a step back from the constant negativity from the news, social media, etc, you can better glimpse the real issues at hand.
Indeed. I think I've spent way too much time arguing with people on HN like you replied to, it's simply not possible to convince them that the world has improved, and so I don't try anymore, I've been getting ragebaited too much in this thread with takes like theirs, about how they apparently can't get into some designer clothing store or another, wholly counting the fact that clothes as a whole have gotten cheaper precisely due to capitalism.
Yeah, there's almost a religious belief nowadays that the world is worse, people are worse off, things are sliding downhill, etc. People are married to the idea and get upset at any evidence to the contrary. It's such a shame.
It's very poetic though, in a tragic sort of way. Very human. I can't think of anything more human than to live in the best age of all time, one others could scarcely have dreamed of, and yet to complain about it incessantly because some have more than others.
Arbeit macht frei!
Ah yes, people working for money, often more than they could make in other jobs in the local economy, is now slavery or concentration camp level conditions. I wish people here would actually live in a second or third world country before saying things like this from the comfort of their air conditioned house.
Slavery would still be slavery if you got paid $0.01/day, so there's clearly some kind of threshold we all have for "good, fairly compensated work".
If your local economy pays you $0.001/day instead, then congratulations, you now make 10x more than everyone else. It doesn't matter how much a dollar is worth elsewhere in the world, because purchasing power parity exists. It's like me being mad that on a hypothetical Mars people make a million dollars a day, that does not affect me whatsoever.
Let's make a concrete example. I'm from Italy, currently living abroad. The salary I was getting where I am now, was almost double what I was offered in my home country. We're told that the cost of living in Italy is also lower than other EU countries. While this is true, it isn't half of the rest of the EU.
I'm now in a situation where I could go back to Italy, but the above is one of the reasons that makes me doubt wheter it would be a good outcome or not.
This is to answer your point about purchasing power. With an Italian salary (considering the same tech job), my purchasing power there would still be lower than my purchasing power here with a local salary.
Yes, it can go both ways depending on the specific purchasing power, I never said otherwise, just my point that in many areas of Asia where factories are, people make way more than their local economy even if it might be less than the US.
> If your local economy pays you $0.001/day instead, then congratulations, you now make 10x more than everyone else.
Sure. The kapos at concentration camps got better food and treatment, too.
That doesn't make it a fair, happy, or good arrangement.
I'm not going to continue with someone like you who'd equate concentration camp contidions to working in a factory. It is simply highly disrespectful to those who've actually lived through or died in them. Have a good day.
> equate concentration camp contidions to working in a factory
Oh no, not accurately stating history!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_labour_under_German_rul...
> The use of slave and forced labour in Nazi Germany (German: Zwangsarbeit) and throughout German-occupied Europe during World War II took place on an unprecedented scale. It was a vital part of the German economic exploitation of conquered territories. It also contributed to the mass extermination of populations in occupied Europe.
Titrating the nastiness of it from "will definitely kill you" to "will make you die miserable, broke, and broken" isn't, IMO, a great fix. People are not required to be satisfied with a tiny pittance just because it's more than their neighbor has.
Not sure what you're talking about, I explicitly said those are concentration camp conditions, so obviously yes Nazis murdered many people while making them work in factories. Seems like you think I think they didn't.
But modern factory conditions are nowhere near what that regime did. If you want to know, work in a factory. That is what I mean by not equating concentration camp contidions to working in a modern factory.
Do modern factories hire enough people to absorb the whole population as workers?
> But modern factory conditions are nowhere near what that regime did.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53481253
> Reports by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) and the US Congress, among others, have found that thousands of Uighurs have been transferred to work in factories across China, under conditions the ASPI report said "strongly suggest forced labour". It linked those factories to more than 80 high-profile brands, including Nike, Apple and Gap.
> China, which is believed to have detained more than one million Uighurs in internment camps in Xinjiang, has described its programmes - which reportedly include forced sterilisation - as job training and education.
China is a different story altogether. They're not democratic so of course you'd expect to see things like that.
China is where all our billionaire companies have outsourced their factories to, to take advantage of those conditions for profit! They are an integral part of the story.
(We're not above doing a little bit of it ourselves, as a treat, either. We left slavery legal in the Thirteenth Amendment, even. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/15/us-prison-wo...)
You seem to be missing a very important part of that history when you make this comparison, and it's a part that I can't imagine you aren't aware of. Not stating that is not "accurately stating history", it's lying by a vile glaring omission. The US also rounded up racial undesirables into camps and used them for labor, but there's a reason that Roosevelt is looked upon more fondly than goddamn Hitler.
> The US also rounded up racial undesirables into camps and used them for labor
This was also bad, yes.
> there's a reason that Roosevelt is looked upon more fondly than goddamn Hitler
Sure, but "less bad" isn't the same as "internment good", and the winners write the history. I am a fan of FDR! But he did some miserable shit to win a war that needed to be won, some of which we cringe at now.
A handful of Nazi war crime prosecutions fell apart because Allied troops widely did the same thing, for example.
This doesn't respond to my point at all. I tell you that it is ahistorical, dishonest, and disrespecful to equate subsistence farmers being forced into subsistence factory work by globalization and economic conditions with the holocaust, the mass deliberate extermination of Jews, Romani, Slavs, the disabled, etc. because one uses slavery and the other uses something that you consider comparable to slavery. Your answer is that less bad things are also bad? Sure, yeah, but they're nevertheless less bad and shouldn't be treated as equal.
Not to make light of poor working conditions, dirt wages, and child labor. They can be and should be addressed. But they're not genocide and throwing out a "Arbeit macht frei!" is gross here.
"It's fine if we mistreat this subgroup, they should be grateful for what we let them have" is a shared theme between the two.
And as noted elsewhere in the conversation, American companies are benefiting from actual concentration camp labor (https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2025/aug/30/revealed-major...) that some deem genocide (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-55973215).
https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/academic/poverty-and-pers...
> Jewish institutions sought to grapple with the consequences of a process of structural pauperization as driven by deliberate policy
This isn't the question.
The question is how much value do they add? If it's more than the money they're making, the people paying them are stealing. You don't like this because it makes it impossible to make money as a capitalist, but that's the entire argument. Making money as a capitalist is always unethical, because it necessarily involves stealing the value of someone else's labor.
Just because you can pay someone $1 to do something that makes you $10 doesn't mean it's ethical. It isn't, ever.
Not everyone subscribes to the labor theory of value, so I question your premise fundamentally.
There is no labor theory of value, only a value theory of labor.
It's funny though, I hadn't read a word of Marx but the first time I understood that I was being paid $15/hr to make websites for a guy who was charging his clients $100 for that same hour of my work, I immediately understood everything about it and its innate truth. I got into the business myself and figured out exactly what value the CEO and the salespeople were bringing, and let me tell you, brother, it wasn't $85. It wasn't even $15. You can call it whatever you want, but you will never convince me that guy wasn't stealing money from me.
It is an economic term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value
> I got into the business myself
Exactly, as capitalism intends. If you don't want to make employee wages then you take on the risk and capital and do it yourself, and are thus rewarded for it. Ironic, if you were actually a socialist you would've tried to help your fellow workers but you instead are the capitalist now.
No, I've never been a capitalist. I don't make money on speculation or other passive deployment of capital. I work for my money. I am no longer in business as a solo operative, but I was never interested in hiring other people to exploit and I don't think I ever will be. But at the time it made more sense to remove the useless leech from the equation because that asshole didn't add any value, and none of the owners of any of the businesses I've worked at since have, either. They've destroyed plenty with idiotic decisions, though.
You went into business as you yourself said. Therefore you are a capitalist. That you didn't hire or "leech" doesn't make you less of one, as you were literally the capital class in your company.
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I will accept that, in context (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48531429), as high praise.
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Say Nazi shit, get compared to Nazis.
Per Godwin himself! Call it his second law. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/19/godwins-la...
Before the chokepoint capitalist: you go to a store and pay $20 for an average-quality product. The value chain benefits by getting $20, you benefit by getting the product. Mutual exchange of value.
After the chokepoint capitalist: the store has closed so you go to a website and pay $30 to receive the crappiest version of the product in 6 to 10 business days. The website gets $20, the value chain that does 100% of the work (the website didn't add value, just stuck itself in the middle of your transaction) gets $7, the post office gets $3, you get the product. Mutual exchange of value.
This "mutual beneficial exchange" stuff is like that xkcd alt text on free speech: it's as if the best argument you can make to support a political position position is that it's not literally illegal to express support for it. "It's a mutually beneficial exchange" is saying the best thing about a transaction is that it's not literally a scam. Seems we should aim a bit higher than that if we want a society that works, yeah?
This is the key insight.
Chant “mutually beneficial exchange” all you want but the system and its players have done everything possible to ensure that everyone at the bottom has as little leverage and as few alternatives as humanly possible.
Every time my mom comes to visit me, she insists on going to the store to buy things just like she always did. There are plenty of stores. In most cases, these brick-and-mortar stores have significantly fewer options than online stores, for obvious reasons -- because they're physical and have limited space. The online stores are often competitively priced, often cheaper, even with shipping, because they have the benefit of scale. I can get an incredible amount of high-quality goods off Amazon at blazing speeds, often the same day, without having to leave my desk, drive my car, burn any fuel, or clog any roads. It provides tons of value.
Not only that, but I have an incredible amount of competition. Thousands of alternative products, listings, websites, etc. I went to buy a standing desk last week, and there were literally thousands of choices all over the internet: solid wood standing desks, aluminum standing desks, tall ones, short ones, mid-century modern ones, futuristic ones, etc.
I have no idea what planet y'all are living on to say that people now have no leverage, few alternatives, no stores, slow delivery, and get no value.
I don't think most people would use this definition. It covers gambling/lottery winnings, finding buried treasure or a gold mine, and paying someone to file your taxes and splitting the extra deductions they found. Really, it includes employment at large- the only 'non-theft' employment would be that which provides no net benefit to the employer. There are parlances where these are included intentionally and they share a starting syllable, but to the common people this is not a definition of theft.
Why do people keep assuming that employers don't do any work? Management is work. Is an employee stealing if they receive any net benefit from their employment?
Everything is a rich man’s trick.
- Documentary
You're overlooking that net new value was created in both of the scenarios. Don't you have any idea how many family horse businesses went under with the invention of the car? How many artisans wound up broke post-industrialization? We can both agree that we'd all be much much poorer in the world where those things didn't happen. NVidia makes a huge margin on the things they sell. Is that theft?
No they aren't overlooking it. They literally call out the additional net value created (i.e. iPhone hw sales), and then call out that to make the enormous amounts that they do make, they also crib value from others (i.e. app store).
You can argue that the app store and vetting process itself is worth up to or over 30% (i.e. they are giving value away, not extracting it), but they make a clear distinction.
Overlooking was the wrong word. I meant more like downplaying or underestimating. Uber completely changed transportation, and the legal saga that follows shows just how big of a change they made on the world, for better or worse. Likewise with Apple and the iphone. They created (or popularized depending on how you want to frame it) the platform that now dominates the human condition. We are literally fumbling, on a global scale, with how to interact with our phones because of how much influence they have over us.
The issue isnt that theyre overlooking new value created it's that you're overlooking the enormous power imbalance some parties are using to exploit others for material gain.
Uber's profit margins are about 10% value created and 90% exploitation of power imbalance between the rich corporation and itinerant drivers and less well capitalized competitors.
Whether somebody acknowledges this reality or not tells you where their political allegiances lie.
The entire "app-based rideshare market" was created by Uber, and in 2026 they don't capture anywhere close to 100% of it. An Uber driver's share of profits without Uber existing is $0.
Back before Uber existed I was ordering a taxi on a website and they even had real time tracking. Yeah it wasn't an app, but most things weren't at that time.
Why is that relevant to what I said?
Because what you said is nonsense. They are capturing a fraction of the value they created with the invention of app-based ridesharing. They are not dipping into some magical pool of "exploitation" to juice that. Anyone that is unhappy with being an Uber driver can literally do anything else. Nobody is forcing them, there is no exploitation.
Absolute horseshit.
They maintain an app and some servers and do some cursory checks on drivers. Those things are pretty easy to do.
In a properly competitive market for ridesharing apps those things would be commoditized to the point that they are pennies per ride.
The vast, vast majority of the value is getting you from A to B whether you are in denial about that or not.
> Uber's profit margins are about 10% value created and 90% exploitation of power imbalance between the rich corporation and itinerant drivers
That feels like a number you are just making up based on hating Uber.
The world is not zero sum, AND in practice most business models are not entirely value creation or rent seeking, but a mix of both.
Ideally a new business creates more value than it simply takes out of an existing marketplace.
I think one can argue a lot of 2010s app-ification, Uber-of-X, or what I called "re-intermediation" was more than 50% rent seeking.
The business model of being willing to lose billions selling $1 of goods for 80cents (before even talking CapEx) until your competitors fold (and then raise prices) is the kind of thing we used to regulate against.
At some point our regulation shifted towards a more short term "if it makes consumer prices lower right now its OK".
The word "create" is too fuzzy here. If the thing that your company is selling wouldn't exist if you hadn't started the company, did you not "create" it?
Parallel invention would like a word. Elisha Gray registered a patent for a telephone the same day as Alexander.
It's impossible to fully prove a counterfactual, but few things "wouldn't exist at all" if "that one person" hadn't done it.
Netflix is a decent example. Many people saw the coming of video streaming. We would still be able to stream videos today even if Hastings had stayed at Rational.
Sure, if you extend time horizon to infinity, everything would probably be invented eventually by someone else. Two people filing patents on the same day is an exceptional case though, not the norm.
There are also products that seemingly should exist but don't because no would-be inventor has found capital, eg. a decent bluetooth keyboard+trackpads with the same layout as a laptop. I know because I spent an hour trying to find one yesterday, and they basically just don't exist.
You don't need to project to the heat death of the universe to get Facebook without Zuckerberg.
But you do need to project to the heat death of the universe to get high speed rail in California, which is the counterfactual worth considering since the entire system of capital is what is under criticism
> Apple made a cool phone that it sells for a high but fair price, but it also takes 30% of everything you buy with that phone
Apple was already a multibillion dollar company almost 30 years before the iPhone was invented...
(though I'm sure you will have no trouble inventing some other reason that that wealth, too, was created through exploitation)
Even before Apple existed Steve Jobs was stealing wages from Steve Wozniak who did the actual work.
We have evidence he was still doing this decades later when he colluded to depress wages with Eric Schmidt at Google when he felt Apple employees were being offered too much in salary.
I'm happy to assume he was stealing money from people at every point in between because he was, quite famously, an asshole.
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I mean Apple only survived because very exploitive Microsoft kept them afloat so that Microsoft had someone to point to as competition when the government came around talking about monopolies. So yeah, Apple only exists because a very exploitive corporation propped them up as protection from consequences of that company's exploitation.
It comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of how the market operated. Profits only come from exchange. It is more accurate to say profits are given than extracted.
What you are describing is exploitation. And to be fair, you probably also mean exploitation. I’ve never really understood the distinction, nor do I believe there is any meaningful distinction. Externalizing costs is just one of many ways capitalists exploit workers. But externalities doesn’t sound quite as bad so maybe capitalists can justify their obviously evil behavior by using a fancier term for their exploitation against their workers.