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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I think the issue is that, while a country is certainly allowed to write it’s own laws, the idea that it is deeply fundamentally immoral for the government to prevent someone from saying something (or compel them to say something) is very deeply baked into the American zeitgeist (of which I am a part.)

    So in the same way that a country is perfectly within its sovereign rights to pass a law that women are property or minorities don’t have the right to vote, I can still say that it feels wrong of them to do so.

    And I would also decry a country that kicks out a company that chooses to employ women or minorities in violation of such a law, even if that is technically their sovereign right to do so.









  • Okay, to be clear, are you arguing that the dichotomy we are choosing between is Notch becoming a billionaire or a corporation reaping the benefits of his labor? I think if those are the options, I prefer the universe where Notch is a billionaire, lol.

    I don’t think that’s what you’re saying, but I’ll admit I’ve read your comment a few times, and couldn’t really latch on to what you point was.

    But to just free associate off of what you said, I think there’s a lot of value to many in the safety of a job vs the life of an entrepreneur. I’m in that situation myself. I know I could easily make 1.5-2x my current salary if I just stood up and LLC and did all my work as a 1099 employee. I’d be able to keep all my current clients and basically nothing would change. I could set my own hours and not have a boss to answer to. But it comes with a lot fewer safety nets, and it means that all the unpleasantness and risk of “running a business” would all fall on me.

    Am I running the risk that I could build a billion dollar product and giving all that surplus capital to my company? Sure. But the odds of that are terribly low, and honestly, it’s a gamble I’m more than willing to take to avoid having to deal with the overhead and risk of striking out on my own with no top cover.


  • The issue is that becoming a billionaire has more to do with being lucky than it does with direct exploitation.

    If everyone in the US chipped 5 dollars into a pool, and it was randomly given to one person, that person would be a billionaire.

    And yes, they have a huge concentration of other people’s labor represented in that cash. But the person who won the pool isn’t a bad person because of that. They didn’t exploit anyone themselves. Just because someone somewhere at some point under capitalism was exploited, that doesn’t lay the moral condemnation at the feet of the lottery winner.


  • Sure, but that argument is specious as hell, right? Like, if everyone in the United States decided to give you a $5 bill, does that instantly make you a bad person who exploited labor to get where you are?

    “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is simply a rhetorical device to outline the flaws in the system. It completely breaks down when used as justification to villainize someone.

    Your position could be equally stated as, “anyone who has more money than me is a worse person than me, and anyone with less money than me is a better person than me.” It’s a misuse of the “no ethical consumption” idea on its face.


  • A fair point. It’s been a while since then. I didn’t recall that.

    That said, he’s just an easy example. There’s a few other people who could be used. There’s a billionaire who was an early Bitcoin adopter for example.

    And it certainly would have been possible for Notch to become a billionaire without hiring people. The company only had 25 employees in 2014, and was doing $330million in revenue every year. There’s certainly a path he could have tread to still becoming a billionaire without hiring anyone.

    It would have been harder, taken longer, and not been as profitable for sure, but doable.


  • Sure, but if that’s the argument, then everyone who has ever bought a laptop that shipped with Windows on it is equally guilty.

    Perhaps even moreso. Those people are giving money to Microsoft. He took a billion dollars away from them.

    But like, this is classic motte and baily. Your initial position was “all billionaires exploit labor for profit,” but when under scrutiny you just retreat to “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, so he’s guilty by virtue of simply participating in the system.”


  • You’re moving the goalposts though, you realize that right?

    Your initial position was that you have to have exploited people to be worth a billion dollars (with an implicit “directly exploited,” since if you can’t make any money without indirectly exploiting people, which would make your point even more pedantic than I’m being.)

    Other people later exploiting others to profit off your product is irrelevant. Hell, it’d be irrelevant if you made your billion dollars and then started exploiting people yourself. You still would have, in fact, become a billionaire without exploiting people to do so.