[discopicante]

These were long tenured and valued employees at Apple. They likely already had healthy pile of cash and stock.

Maybe it was the environment at OpenAI encouraging this behavior. Or, is this a particular set of skills some/all of the individuals mentioned were already well-practiced at?

I hope this case goes to court so we can find out.

[ryukoposting]

This is the caricature of Silicon Valley made real. It doesn't matter how much money Liu had, it isn't enough. It will never be enough. The entire culture is fixated on maximizing growth. Whether that's growth of the corporation or growth of one's own wealth. The Reagan-era "greed is good" thing never really died here (among other places).

[WalterBright]

Greed is good works a lot better than everybody gets the same compensation regardless.

[nerdsniper]

When analyzing an optimization problem, the optimal values for the input variables are often found to lie somewhere between min and max.

It’s not clear that the person you replied to was advocating for one extreme, but even given that your strawman-esque assertion is probably true … I’d suggest analyzing a few other points in the domain beyond merely the two extremes that you contrasted.

Which range of the domain do you think we’d be most likely to find the optimal values for society? Do you believe that range might actually be inclusive of either limit? Are you sure you’d like to live in a world where the extreme limit of income inequality is manifest?

[ryukoposting]

This guy tried to instigate a flame war with me about Rust or something a few years ago, pay no mind. Subtlety isn't in the internet's lexicon.

[nerdsniper]

I respect WalterBright. I think his accomplishments are admirable. We’ve agreed on some fascinating issues in the past. We disagree sometimes. I’ve seen him thoughtfully consider new viewpoints occasionally.

[ryukoposting]

It's the internet. We're all somebody, we're all nobody in particular. Unless your birth certificate says Sniper, Nerd.

[WalterBright]

I'm fine with people creating wealth that becomes theirs. That wealth appears because other people place value on it. The wealth is not taken from other people. If you decided to cap it, it caps prosperity of the economy, because their wealth comes from creating what other people want. Why would you want to limit prosperity?

Keep in mind that Mush created 4000 millionaires the day SPCX was IPO'd.

[nerdsniper]

I’m just not convinced that value creation and value extraction are well-linked when examining outlier cases. The nature of outliers makes it far more likely that value extraction would be much more likely to exceed net value creation. Even if for the more median percentiles, value creation and extraction are well-correlated.

I wouldn’t suggest a cap, but I would suggest very high tax rates and a more stern eye towards anti-competitive practices and negative externalities.

As a thought experiment:

Celebrating unbounded greed (the most “extreme” option) would be celebrating when politicians steal as much money as they can by manipulating stock markets and Kalshi and taking crypto bribes, taking kickbacks from contractors and blackmailing or strong-arming the other branches of government.

Celebrating unbounded greed would be celebrating selling poisoned food and telling ourselves that its the stupid people’s fault for buying melamine-contaminated milk without getting it tested by their own independent third party before drinking it. And then blaming the stupid people again when their third party testing lab that was trustworthy gets purchased by the same private equity group that owns the milk company and starts watering down or falsifying their tests.

Celebrating unbounded greed would be celebrating people whose wealth increased by neglecting expensive safety protocols, blowing up neighborhoods with gas explosions, and silencing them by intimidation, as well as blackmailing and bribing the judges overseeing any torts.

The more of this you allow and celebrate, the more your outliers grow and become a true bimodal distribution. Where the peak earners are, by necessity, extracting more value than they create.

The thing is, we have had a lot of things like this happen in most developed countries. There is a lot of corruption, and it’s not divided along party lines. Celebrating and glorifying unbounded greed is likely to lead towards a state where there’s less “rule of law” and more “rule by force”.

Relatively unbounded greed can probably work quite well in a society with a strong rule of law to protect against corruption, dangerous/damaging corner cutting and fraud… as well as an economy that actually meets the assumptions of a “free market”: i.e. no individual buyer or seller has enough concentrated power to significantly impact the supply-demand curve all by themselves.

[WalterBright]

> politicians steal as much money as they can

I am not talking about people who steal wealth, which is illegal. I'm not celebrating or making excuses for thieves or criminals. I'm talking about people who create wealth via the free market.

I agree that externalities are a problem, as it pushes costs onto others.

> as well as an economy that actually meets the assumptions of a “free market”: i.e. no individual buyer or seller has enough concentrated power to significantly impact the supply-demand curve all by themselves.

The free market does not require that a large player be prohibited from shifting the s-d curve. For example, ever-cheaper computers shifted the curve. And that was good for us.

[joe_mamba]

> The Reagan-era "greed is good" thing never really died here (among other places).

"Greed is good" is the MO everywhere on the planet now. Everyone I know in EU is trying to cash in as much as they can while the going is still good because they feel the ladder constantly being pulled from them (layoffs and wage stagnation everywhere, housing costs massively outpacing wage growth, etc). Either from scamming their company or from scamming the government and welfare system.

And the compound the issue, the government trying to "fix" this only makes things worse as they just add more taxes on the honest working class people in their quest to tax "the rich" and give to the poor, which is only a populist measure for votes, nothing that actually fixes the problem since none of the globalist robber barons are affected by such policies as all their wealth is tied in a network of international foundations, charities, trust funds, etc. so when you add a 3 Euro tax on Aliexpress items, you're only gonna hurt the guy trying to repair his TV and washing machine, not the real estate magnate living in Monaco.

I don't think we can escape this downward spiral in any peaceful and democratic way. That's probably why the EU is pushing all these privacy invading laws lately, to catch and crush any public uprisings before they happen.

[ryukoposting]

> Everyone I know in EU is trying to cash in as much as they can while the going is still good because they feel the ladder constantly being pulled from them

Your friends probably aren't engaging in "greed is good" themselves, just responding to the economic conditions created by people who are engaging in it.

In the American cultural headspace, "greed is good" refers to a very specific brand of robber-baron capitalism. It's a doctrine that was first given academic legitimacy by the University of Chicago's school of economics, then put into practice in the 1980s under the Reagan administration, and nowadays its loudest proponents are Musk and Thiel. It's an economic theory that lionizes extractive behavior by the economic elite, with some bullshit trickle-down argument that's too convoluted to be worth explaining here.

It creates an environment where everyone had to do evil shit just to put a roof over their heads, a self-regulating race to the bottom. Your friends are likely just unwilling participants, a side effect of "greed is good" rather than doers of it.

[jjfremont]

> "greed is good" refers to a very specific brand of robber-baron capitalism.

It does not. It refers to the Eighties brand of corporate raiders and excess Capitalism. It's a quote from the film, "Wall Street". That whole paragraph is wrongly conflating ideas.

[ryukoposting]

> It refers to the Eighties brand of corporate raiders and excess Capitalism.

Quote from my own comment:

> put into practice in the 1980s under the Reagan administration

Are you contesting the name "greed is good" because it was coined after the underlying theory was crafted? If so, I disagree. We didn't have the word "smartphone" until after those existed. The word "Christianity" wasn't invented while Jesus was alive. Trees existed before we named them.

Reagan didn't just pull a new breed of economic policy out of his ass in January of 1981. The Chicago School is informative of neocon economic policy, and once you get past the pictures of frogs, not much has changed about the modern conservative economic platform.

[joe_mamba]

>Your friends probably aren't engaging in "greed is good" themselves, just responding to the economic conditions created by people who are engaging in it.

Yes, which is why I said "Everyone I know in EU is trying to cash in as much as they can while the going is still good".

[WalterBright]

The growth of the welfare state sucks the life out of the economy.

[bastardoperator]

Agreed, we are giving an absolute load of welfare to billionaires. From tax breaks to bailouts, and to your point, it's sucking the life out of the American economy.

[WalterBright]

Entitlements are 54 to 60% of Federal spending.

[bastardoperator]

Mandatory spending, they have obligations to Americans. I'm sorry veterans, seniors, poor people, and the disabled are such an inconvenience for you, or that you don't know what the word entitlement means.

[raverbashing]

Or they simply don't care, or don't see it as a problem

[godelski]

  > They likely already had healthy pile of cash and stock.

True for every billionaire too. They have so much money not only do they make it faster than they can literally spend it[0]. They have so much money their great grandchildren never have to work, even if they procreate like Musk.

For many people money is not about how it can be used to buy things to improve your life but about the social status that that wealth gives you. Take Musk as an example. He cared a lot about becoming a trillionaire. But even a billion is an incomprehensible level of wealth

[0] on a 5% interest account you'd make >$5k/hr or >$4m every month. Literally the time it takes to spend your money will allow you to recoup it. E.g in the time it takes to buy a Tesla you'll have earned more than a Tesla costs. Same even for supercars, which take longer to buy.

[RyanOD]

Or maybe they are just greedy, terrible human beings.

[wolvesechoes]

So, typical species in Silicon Valley?