[thulecitizen]

> Must there always be an issue when the data doesn't suit a worldview? Why compromise a survey 's integrity with your own bias?

Hello. Might I remind you of the Global North's historic and continued plundering of the Global South (developing countries)?

Or should we forget about all of that?

> It costs virtually $0 these days to start a SaaS company

Yes, if you have a big cultural inheritance (which was itself plundered and stolen and appropriated from other countries). Oh yes, and you need a big trust fund and upper class parents, or at the least a pedagogical mentor who stimulates you, nourishes your curiosity.

By saying this you are showing me the holy ground you are standing on. There are many hands who touch your life every day: feeding you, making your clothes, your electronics, etc. Check out the True Cost (2015): https://youtu.be/OaGp5_Sfbss?t=32, or 'Steve Jobs: The Man In The Machine': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhWKxtsYrJE

Two key areas one can focus on: 1) imperial intellectual property machine - the work of Ruth Okediji is revealing with this: http://www.commonlii.org/sg/journals/SGJlIntCompLaw/2003/14....

and 2) Corporatist/institutionalized plundering since the colonial era: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/britain-stole-45-t...

Please would you consider these and try to understand their implications on today's reality?

[dang]

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. It just makes the thread even worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[thulecitizen]

Dear dang, please could you unflag my comment?

I am up for a debate, and I am happy to be shown other perspectives. Yet flagging my comment seems to be the easiest way to scrub something you don't like, while avoiding constructive debate. It seems to me that you are labeling my writing as starting an 'ideological flamewar', when I would argue I back up my arguments with leading research/references.

I just replied to another comment below, with more links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22153575

When I googled ‘flamewar’, wikipedia defines it as:

"a flame war is a series of flame posts or messages in a thread that are considered derogatory in nature or are completely off-topic"

I am making connections that I think are worthwhile. They might seem overly critical and negative to those who are not familiar with the arguments. Do you want to limit connections you don’t make yourself, and discard them as ‘off-topic’ because you aren’t familiar with the research?

That sounds a bit like cherry-picking to me.

I don’t understand how constructive critique like this can be flagged, and my comment muted/hidden. Are we not all humans typing away at our keyboards here? Is your perspective really the ‘right’ or only useful perspective?

The only reason I can think of for you and others to flag my comment is if my comments are getting in the way of you or others in Silicon Valley from charging your rents? Is it that you see some truth in what I share that you might not be comfortable with?

[dang]

I'm sorry, but it's a classic generic ideological tangent to take a thread about SaaS into "the Global North's historic and continued plundering of the Global South". If we allow that, every thread will eventually turn into a generic ideological flamewar. That's how the internet works by default, and one must make a conscious effort to prevent that if one wants to prevent it, which we do. Comments like yours lead precisely to comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22153317, and worse, so please don't do that here.

If you're sincerely worried about the moderation favoring one ideology over another, you're welcome to look through the many past occasions where I've posted moderation comments about this: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... We don't keep any counts, but you'll find plenty of examples of every side getting the same sort of moderation reply when commenters take a thread in this sort of direction.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[hecatoncheires]

So you give the example of Britain plundering India. Explain to me why Indians in America are the most successful ethnic group in the country then, at almost twice the median income of white people?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...

By your logic of white "holy ground" whites should obviously be at the top of the list, no? Instead Indians and East Asians are.

[bergstromm466]

What is there to explain? I am not challenging the intelligence of one ethnicity over another, that seems to be your argument here.

My argument is that we tell countries in the Global South to use strategy B (free competition) to try to become ‘successful’ like us, when actually we ourselves used strategy A (infant industry protection and export subsidies) [1].

In other words, we give them advice we ourselves didn’t follow, and then blame them for not having ‘caught up’ and become ‘developed’.

The delivery mechanisms for rich cultural inheritances, and use of the best time-saving strategies, are increasingly made artificially scarce through a combination of (1) the money system, and (2) through the IP system (the Aaron Swartz Doc. is great on this). Silicon Valley is Silicon Valley because of the US Intellectual Property regime.

To understand this deeper, I'd implore you to check out the work of Guy Standing [2]:

"…today, a tiny minority of people and corporate interests across the world are accumulating vast wealth and power from rental income, not only from housing and land but from a range of other assets, natural and created. ‘Rentiers’ of all kinds are in unparalleled ascendancy and the neo-liberal state is only too keen to oblige their greed.

Rentiers derive income from ownership, possession or control of assets that are scarce or artificially made scarce. Most familiar is rental income from land, property, mineral exploitation or financial investments, but other sources have grown too. They include the income lenders gain from debt interest; income from ownership of ‘intellectual property’ (such as patents, copyright, brands and trademarks); capital gains on investments; ‘above normal’ company profits (when a firm has a dominant market position that allows it to charge high prices or dictate terms); income from government subsidies; and income of financial and other intermediaries derived from third-party transactions."

The reviewer of Chang’s book then goes on to write:

"Rather than a “free market,” the neoliberal global economy praised as “free trade” by policy wonks is actually “a global framework of institutions and regulations that enable elites to maximise their rental income.”

Standing says 31% of Western corporate profits today, as opposed to 17% in 1999, are in industries where profits are rents on artificial scarcities like patents, copyrights and trademarks enforced under the neoliberal treaty regime established in the ’90s. To take one example, Apple — thanks to patents, copyrights and trademarks — runs a 40% gross profit on the iPhone. Two-thirds of drug research is funded by taxpayers, while patents add $140 billion to the annual price of drugs in the United States. And Standing makes short work of the propaganda myth in favor of so-called “intellectual property”; rather than being a reward for innovation, the main actual purpose of patents is to prevent others from innovating. This is especially egregious, considering that most of the new technologies and products under patent were developed with heavy taxpayer R&D subsidies, and then enclosed for private profit.

Alongside rents on the artificial scarcity of ideas, the state provides enormous rents to the propertied classes through the enclosure of land and natural resource commons, dating back to the enclosure of peasant land in early modern Europe, the engrossment of land (both vacant and native-occupied) in settler societies like America and Australia, the hacienda system in Latin America, the nullification of peasant land rights by colonial powers in Asia and Africa, and the looting of oil and mineral resources. Property claims to all these forms of looted land and resources have persisted in the hands of Western capital under neocolonialism, and one of the main functions of the state is to enforce such titles — in the name of “defending private property rights” — against attempts at reclamation by their rightful owners.”

[1] Kicking Away the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective by Ha-Joon Chang (2002)

[2] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-08-03/book-day-corru...