You don't have to inherit billions from your parents to have a huge leg up on everyone else. There are examples all over the place from something as extravagant 'a small loan of a million dollars' to 'an introduction to a vp at ibm', to paying their kids tuition to the best private schools. I am extremely suspicious of any wealthy person who claims to be 'self made' when in reality they had a paved path to success.
Are we calling them "self-made" now for strapping some http requests to old, purposefully gate-kept banking systems? Or is it the ones that we allowed to horizontally expand with zero regulatory system to stop them? Or is it the ones who ruined housing the world over? So many useful people.
> ~80% of current billionaires in the U.S. are self-made first generation.
I see conflicting evidence to the claim[0,1,2]
I'd argue that you also got to be really careful with these studies. Defining "self-made" is not a straight forward issue. In some sense, no person is self made as we're all products of our environments and the opportunities presented to us. If it were consistent you wouldn't see these numbers swing between studies, so don't just pick the highest one. Metrics are deceptive because their subtleties and you need to carefully consider their alignment.
>> Defining "self-made" is not a straight forward issue
Forbes has an interesting (to me at least) self-made score that assigns ten categories from "Inherited fortune but not working to increase it" to "Self-made who not only grew up poor but also overcame significant obstacles", https://www.forbes.com/sites/gigizamora/2023/10/03/the-2023-....
Yeah this is the major issue and I think there's a big difference in how people internalize the notion of "self-made" vs how others actually utilize the terminology. Definitely part of this is due to human psyche where we (generally) place importance on our actions rather than our environment (which makes sense due to this is what we have (more) direct control over). There is also a significant number of people who have high incentives to weaken the definition and many do become true believers.
1/10 = Inherited fortune but not working to increase it
10/10 = Self-made who not only grew up poor but also overcame significant obstacles
Here's some clearer example of what may lead to confusion.
- Forbes gives Elon a self made score of 8/10. That's high, for this list considering what 10 means but 8 also is large with "middle-class or upper-middle-class background" (including Zuck and Bezos). Certainly Elon is significantly self-made (his family certainly weren't billionaires) but there is ambiguity about what class he grew up in. According to his dad[0], he paid for Elon's trip to Canada and his education (also discussing the sale of a private aircraft) while Elon claims he grew up poor and came to the Americas with only with $2.5k to his name and ended with $100k in student debt ($100k 1987 = $187k 2023). Certainly there is animosity between father and son and I'm willing to believe Elon believes he's telling the truth (not synonymous with being the truth). But Elon claims a 10/10 self-made score while the dad is saying something closer to a 7 (which is still quite privileged by the average person's standards: "got head start from wealthy family"). Elon's net worth is (Forbes) estimated $245bn and rank #1.
- Forbes equally ranks Bezos and the wiki page is kinda wild[1]. At birth his mom was a high school senior and father was a uni-cyclist but he also attended a Montessori school at age 2. At 4 his mom remarried and his step dad (Mark Bezos) worked for Exxon as an engineer. But Jeff also says Amazon was a family effort and it looks like his parents loaned him $245k ($480k 2023) and they're also billionaires now due to "early investment." I think it is safe to say most will consider Bezos much more self-made than Musk especially considering his dad (Mike) was a Cuban refuge refuge and still a student when his parents married. Without a doubt the average person would call Bezos self made and even believe he struggled and his success is highly conditioned on his work and ability to take advantage of ample opportunities at the time. Bezos's net worth is estimated $170bn and rank 3.
- Now one spot up (9/10) we have Sergei Brin[2] (link for history, you're on HN, you know who Sergei is...). Born in Soviet Russia to a math professor father and engineer mother. The wiki article discusses job loss, troubles getting out of Poland, and let's be honest, professors and NASA engineers are not the wealthiest of people, but neither are they poor (he also attended a Montessori School. I'm not shilling, I'm mentioning because private schools are expensive so puts some objective signal on family wealth). I think the average person would without a doubt not just think Sergei is self made but went through significant struggle, no matter where on the spectrum of "middle class" he grew up on (prof + engineer is reasonably upper middle). Sergei's estimated net worth is $110bn and rank 10.
- At 10/10 is George Soros[3], born in 1930 Budapest to (non-observing) Jewish parents I think we all know what happened. They didn't leave Hungry till post war (1947). There is mention that his family was themselves a bit antisemitic at the time and in 1944 were able to pose as Christians. No matter the personal beliefs I think it would be __difficult__ to claim that Soros is highly self-made and __without a doubt__ had struggles that few others can relate to in terms of severity (this history likely explains his passion for politics). Soros's net worth is estimated $6.7bn and ranked 396
Assuming all this is reasonably true, there's a crazy amount of difference between ranks 7 and 10. I honestly think most people would think a Forbes 7 is a 2 or 3 out of 10 and would interpret a 7 as vastly self made.
Edit: also kind crazy we live in a time where this can all be found and compiled in ~30 minutes. That's definitely a privileged environment, at least to my personal belief.
> if they are represented as cardinal somewhere I wouldn't agree with that.
I'd disagree. While in a well defined ordinal metric you can always map to a cardinal system by means of grouping (losing precision), but that well defined condition is a bit of a killer. Certainly in language it is not true and I'm suspicious that one could find well defined metrics with global optima that account for all reasonable variables. This is why cardinal systems are highly effective for voting systems (social choice) as it is accepting that the conditions that one is ranking preference on is not universally agreed upon and thus is baking in a noise term to the model. Not to mention is far more computationally efficient (fuck man, we gotta rebuild the entire self-made graph every time someone enters or leaves the list and an entire recompute when metrics/variables change (and they will)).
> I assume that "I think it would be __difficult__ to claim that Soros is highly self-made" has a missing not somewhere?
Ops, yeah, that is correct. Soros is one of the clearer examples of someone being self made. But we can see the other examples are far less clear and understand how someone my place significantly different weightings on the various variables at play. But I think with the exception for holocaust deniers, people are going to generally agree that "Jew during Nazi occupation" trumps almost anything else.
On the Musk/Bezos stuff, I think one read of any comments or interviews with Elon's estranged father (who amongst various acts, has fathered a child with his own step-daughter) indicates pretty quickly that the guy is a bit off, at best. This [1] is the article Wiki chose to cite to justify the claim that Elon grew up in wealth. Here are the combined comments from his father from the article:
"We went to this guy’s prefab and he opened his safe and there was just stacks of money and he paid me out, £80,000, it was a huge amount of money. He then gave me the opportunity to spend £40,000 on an emerald mine. I said, ‘Oh, all right’. So I became a half owner of the mine, and we got emeralds for the next six years. We were very wealthy. We had so much money at times we couldn’t even close our safe. One person would have to hold the money in place with another closing the door. And then there’d still be all these notes sticking out and we’d sort of pull them out and put them in our pockets."
In a normal world, this is about the time you turn off the recorder and thank the guy for coming in, not citing it as established fact. Of course we don't live in anything like a normal world though.
The article is saying that the inherited wealth of the remaining 20% of today's billionaires is greater than the wealth of those new-made billionaires, there's no contradiction there at all. And obviously you'd expect most new billionaires to have a net wealth close to the $1bn mark, so all it would take is each of the 20% to inherit four times as much on average.
This page lists nine people who inherited over $50bn each, and another 23 who inherited between $4bn and $50bn, totalling just over $1.1tn of inherited wealth. Easy to see how that would outweigh the wealth of a larger number of new billionaires.
And another large chunk are first generation inherited. Like self made mom or dad just kicked the bucket. This myth of multi-generational, dynastic absurd wealth is.... nonsense with few exceptions.
Technology is inherently about making things better. Whether it's just making a tool easier to use, or fundamentally changing how people behave - it's all about altering what we do now. It's not really possible to be a technologist and a (small c) conservative - the definition being "averse to change or innovation and holding traditional values.". Being "progressive" - by the dictionary "an advocate of social reform" - is at least compatible with the technologist mindset (although you could still be a technologist without any desire for social reform).
Obviously the values held by "Conservative" political parties are not simply about being "conservative" - but it's not particularly surprising that people who like the idea of changing things aren't a big fan of a political movement which is based on doing things the way we always have.
of course, amusingly, it's also well-known as a right-leaning forum too
i used to think that the fact that both ideas were in currency indicated that it was probably unbiased. I now think that it probably means that the "right-wing"/"progressive" indicators are too simplistic a way to describe the actual underlying biases.
Good point. It's probably more accurate to say it is biased to whatever opinions benefit the YC business model (which is understandable. It's their forum, after all). For example, speaking out against anything other than very lax immigration policy is verboten because driving down American labor costs benefits VC's. Saying anything positive about the previous president will get you downvoted immediately.
(This isn't related to my personal political opinions, I'm just using it as an example.)
There are definitely strands of HN popular opinion that strongly align with YC'S business model (the idea that funding and scale are barometers for success and YC's selection heuristics are actually how you should run your business) but I certainly wouldn't have picked migration as one of the example. If anything, I get the opposite impression when the notion of the threat to devs' one percenter status posed by underpaid and exploited visa recipients willing to wrap text in javascript for a mere 100k per annum comes up, especially if that's compared and contrasted with the general enthusiasm for the idea automating away everyone else's job and replacing it with a UBI. It'd be difficult to find anywhere else quite as hostile to the ads so many YC companies and their acquirers depend on either.
They are good examples of the GP's comment about the idea of a position on a line between left and right wing orthodoxy being the wrong way to describe how HN coalesces around ideas though...
If the SVB debacle taught us anything, it is that even the most libertarian free-market aficionados love their “nanny state” when it’s them who’s in trouble.
This place (commenters) is majority hard-left. Any perception that it's 'right-leaning' is because the moderators are tolerant of non-leftist viewpoints. This, as you may know, constitutes heresy in leftist circles.
Moderation and votes are two different things. Moderators only concern themselves with spam and outstanding violations of rules, that are mostly politeness rules. It's not like there are rules against certain ideology.
Commenters and voters are the same thing and if we were all hard-left, any different viewpoint would be downvoted into oblivion, no matter what the moderators could think.
My guess is that the people around here is a motley crew. Average would be leaning left, but much less than Reddit, to compare with something else.
That’s funny because the left currently dominates all aspects of culture, academia, work, and society. The orthodox is solidly “progressive” right now.
The world isn't a binary choice between either left or right.
The overwhelming majority of the world operates in the grey middle which is what is codified into policies, laws, precedents, standards, norms etc. And much of it is universal across the world e.g. the concept of professional conduct in companies.
There something true about it though. People see the world through “my tribe, not my tribe”. Left vs right. Islam vs non-Islam. West vs non-west. Sunni vs Shia. etc.
Because the self described left has de-emphasized economic and labor concerns, and prioritize intersectional identity as defining oppressor and oppressed categories.
Depends on which industries you are in and where you live. If you are in tech or finance this may be true to some extent. If you are in academia it’s definitely true unless you are at one of those far right religious colleges.
If you are in construction, energy, manufacturing, or countless other fields it’s either not true or only present to a “token” degree in the form of some sensitivity training seminar you have to listen to for HR onboarding.
>the left currently dominates all aspects of culture, academia, work, and society
What a weird statement. Dominates all of culture? Work? Society??!
The extremes on both ends do definitely dominate in the public debate which is frustrating (and, I think, dangerous). It makes it seem like the average person is much less reasonable than I believe they are.
The extremes dominate the public debate, because the media is outrage-driven for clicks. Thus insane voices get amplified, and our public discourse goes insane.
Jokes aside, the left wing has a reality bias. Left-wing people have a greater propensity than right-wing people to adapt their views to fit reality. Right-wing people have the propensity to make reality fit their views. IIRC this has been shown in scientific studies, but you'll probably say those are controlled by the left.
> No one has done more to harm the environment than environmentalists that advocate against nuclear power.
I mean we all learn from our mistakes, I surely was against nuclear power when I was young but I think for ok reasons. Now the world is in a worse spot than it was so I changed my mind a little. Still, it's silly to pretend that that caused more "harm to the environment".
that may be historically true, but today you can build much more KW of solar+batteries than KW of nuclear for the same price. Continuing to advocate for nuclear is throwing away money that could be spent on the green transition.
But just to be clear, unlike the hypothetical "spreadsheet on a desktop" (even with signed transactions), Lightning has more cryptographic assurances than that.
It prevents the parties of a transaction from double-spending balances behind each other's backs.
It also doesn't require trusting the other party once a transaction has (almost instantaneously) completed.
Ok, so can I now redeem the BTC that you sent me earlier please, so that I can spend them in the first layer (or the second one)? Given that nobody else seems to want to use your third layer.
The fact that I even have to ask you already demonstrates how shitty your third layer is compared to Lightning, not to mention all the other obvious ways in which it's infinitely worse.
I know you're trolling and I even found your comments somewhat humorous, but I hope you're not misleading yourself (or others) into thinking that you have a valid point here or that your "third layer" scenario is in any way comparable to Lightning in anything except the most superficial ways...
In any case, seeing that I don't have a valid signed BTC transaction from you (because your 3rd layer suuucks), you don't want to allow free exchange between your layer and the upper layers, and I wouldn't want to bother with court litigation even if you were serious, well, have a nice day and good luck with your third layer lol
I think the implication is government putting pressure (or working with) businesses to censor speech. Smaller government would mean less attack surface in that case.
Market forces and competition should help keep speech free because if a private company doesn't allow x group to use their platform, it is likely a competitor will spring up to capture the orphaned market. We see this play out in reality.
>Market forces and competition should help keep speech free because if a private company doesn't allow x group to use their platform, it is likely a competitor will spring up to capture the orphaned market.
This doesn't really apply in the same way in social media. Social media platforms organically turn into monopolies.
X and Facebook and Reddit and Hackernews and Whatsapp are all social media, sure, but they are not in direct competition. One does not start or stop using Instagram because they use Reddit. Same with Hackernews and X, etc etc. The product is different.
When you ban an ideology or a group from a piece of social media, they do run to competitors, but "competitors" which can never penetrate the market because they don't have the userbase, which is the main incentive of social media.
So far-right people get banned from Twitter and they run to Gab, but Gab and Twitter aren't really competitors because Twitter can't ever penetrate into Gab's market (they banned that market to begin with) and Gab can't penetrate Twitter's market (because Twitter is the more attractive platform to begin with, having more users)
The better product is better because of its userbase. There is no real competition, and as such, no upholding of freedom of speech due to it.
~80% of current billionaires in the U.S. are self-made first generation.