Techie billionaires

Discussion in 'General Science & Technology' started by texancowgirl, Mar 26, 2008.

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  1. texancowgirl Registered Member

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    This blog has a list of how many young billionaires made their money off software. It's kind of funny. hotfixupdate.blogspot.com/2008/03/techies-will-take-over-someday.html
     
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  3. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    People always get rich by investing their labor and capital in important new technologies. Railroads, newspapers, petroleum, electrically or electronically reproduced entertainment... information technology is just the next step.

    More importantly, IT is not just a new technology but a whole Paradigm Shift for civilization like industry, metallurgy, city-building and agriculture (which predates civilization but is what made civilization possible). The massive concentrations of capital that were needed for the physical projects of the industrial era (transcontinental railroads, oil refineries, steel mills) required governments to invent "artificial persons," or corporations, to make that concentration possible.

    Information Age projects don't require so much capital. Americans are starting up software houses in places like Estonia with nothing more than their life savings. We could see the role of the corporation being diminished, as only the few that support the information-based economy, like Microsoft and FedEx, will thrive. The others are already transforming from producers to scavengers, feeding off of each other's dying hulks.

    So the question is, what new artifact will government and business leaders collude to create for the Information Age, and what are we going to have to do to prevent it from taking advantage of the private citizen, the way corporations do?

    As the old Chinese curse puts it: "May you live during interesting times."

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  5. texancowgirl Registered Member

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    You've made some good points. But when you ask, "what are we going to have to do to prevent it from taking advantage of the private citizen, the way corporations do," aren't you forgetting that corporations are comprised of private citizens? Also, is it the lack of privacy that you're afraid of? It seems contradictory to be afraid of government intrusion (i.e. communists) and yet be afraid of corporations as well (since corporations are very capitalistic).

    Just trying to play devil's advocate here. Overall, I really like your post.
     
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  7. Lord Hillyer Banned Banned

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    Someday? They already have taken over.
     
  8. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    In addition to its function in the industrial economy, the corporation was also created to take over the role of the aristocracy as democracy replaced feudalism. Like aristocrats, these "artificial persons" are far more powerful than the average citizen, they can't be executed for their crimes, they can't even be punished because they just pass fines onto their customers, and their colorful shenanigans serve the purpose of distracting us from the real shenanigans of the people in the government.

    A corporation is "comprised of private citizens" only in theory. In practice, most stockholders wield very little control and are content to take a modest share of the profits while bearing no risk of loss beyond their investment. For the founders of the enterprise they provide the advantages of both a partner and a lender, with none of the disadvantages of either: they can't meddle in the business decisions like a partner, but they can't seize the founders' personal wealth like a creditor if the enterprise fails.

    This is a really sweet deal for the founders of the enterprise and it would have been legally impossible without the invention of the corporation. For us denizens of the Industrial Era it's difficult to imagine any other way to fund its massive projects, but I suspect our imaginations are curtailed by reality. Perhaps another way could have been found.
    If you mean in the context of the Information Age, certainly. But that genie is out of the bottle. I'll be fortunate enough to die before sensors are developed that can tell exactly what I'm doing and saying inside my home, my location can be identified from ten feet away by the DNA in my exhalations, and all the details of my life are available to the public. But younger people will have to deal with it and I'm sure they'll adapt, considering that one of their increasingly popular naughty thrills is to have sex in public. (It became a real issue in the Las Vegas casinos a couple of years back and I haven't heard how--or if--it was resolved. Perhaps the "What happens in Vegas..." slogan was the resolution.

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    We libertarians are on neither the left nor the right. We believe in both individual and economic freedom and are often defined by the shorthand, "economically conservative, socially liberal." We're traditional Jeffersonian liberals: "That government governs best which governs least." Gloria Steinem's supposedly rebellious motto, "The authority of any governing institution must stop at its citizens' skin," horrifies us because it must stop much closer to its own body than ours.

    We believe in capitalism because socialism by definition requires a fearfully powerful government. (And all despotic governments are hardly communist!) But it's the capitalism of Adam Smith, a level playing field with producers and consumers of reasonably equal power. Smith would turn over in his grave if he saw his model taken over by "artificial persons" with the wealth and power of small African nations. And he would probably throw up in his grave if someone explained the concept of the "holding company" to him.

    I do not speak for the libertarian community because they're still catching their breath after the demise of communism (and ruing the observation that that wasn't enough to bring about the demise of despotism) and haven't noticed yet that there might be any flaws in our system that need fixing.
     
  9. Lord Hillyer Banned Banned

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    It doesn't bode well for an ideological group (especially a tiny one that if nothing else should be nimble) that it still hasn't come to terms with an event that happened a generation ago.
     
  10. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    They've come to terms by now with a world in which communism is no longer perceived as the most important threat to liberty.

    But my theory of the corporation as the Industrial Era's analog of the aristocracy is not obvious to everyone, and it's not like I've published it anywhere. (You heard it first on SciForums, kids!) Most libertarians are former conservatives who stopped advocating big government when they noticed that right-wing authoritarianism doesn't work any better than left-wing authoritarianism. (Like the Third Reich wasn't adequate evidence of that.) The War on Drugs turned two generations of them into outlaws and it didn't take much of a revelation to realize it was a repeat of Prohibition complete with all the second-order effects. The good-hearted among them may have approved of the (very belated) big-government efforts to overturn segregation, but they quickly recoiled against Affirmative Discrimination. Most of them still think that simply rolling back government regulation of corporations, including the arguably unconstitutional peacetime income tax with its double-taxation of corporate income, is all it will take for the economy to right itself. And during good times nobody complains about corporate greed.

    I'm one of the oddball libertarians who was originally a left-liberal, a registered Peace & Freedom Party voter. During the 1950s and 1960s it was easy to see government as an--at least grudging--force for social liberty. But I majored in accounting and minored in economics, and as a former math major with a minor in science I could see both the justice and the beauty in Adam Smith's model. The corporate greed that drove the growth of the "military-industrial complex" (a phrase coined by Eisenhower, a Republican!) and the corporate irresponsibility that pandered to our social irresponsibility about health and the environment, reinforced my skepticism about these "artificial persons." Spending most of our lives as employees of the world's largest municipal government presented my wife and me with daily examples of government as, at best, an institution of benign ineptitude, and at worst a force of creeping authoritarianism and the Nanny State.

    Holding companies... SUVs that get seven miles per gallon (32L/100km)... health insurance firms whose lawyers and accountants overrule the decisions of doctors... not to mention the consulting firms I worked for after bailing out of civil service in my fifties at great finanial sacrifice... solidified my attitude about corporations.

    I voted for every Libertarian Party presidential candidate since 1984, but this largely unreconstructed hippie finally severed my ties to my beloved old left-liberal friends when one of us, Bill Clinton, the draft-dodgin', pot-smokin', free-lovin', race-mixin', rock n' roll blowin' Rhodes Scholar, killed all those people at Ruby Ridge and Waco. Everyone here knows my feelings about religion but you have also heard me insist that it's possible to "love the sinner while hating the sin," to use their own language. Like every small-l libertarian and capital-L Libertarian, I uphold the Constitution, and that means you don't get to shoot people just because they belong to a wacky religious cult.

    Libertarianism is not just an economic philosophy.
     
    Last edited: Mar 28, 2008
  11. Syzygys As a mother, I am telling you Valued Senior Member

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    It is nothing special really. Tech was the new frontier, usually the few who start out early makes it like crazy, be it goldfever, oilwells, etc.
     
  12. eboarder2020 Registered Member

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    The thing with technology is that it can be formed and fitted to work in all sorts of environments. You've got young people like the maker of facebook creating entertainment, another finding a use of technology in solar panels, another in medicine and another in software. Technology is a beast with infinitely many heads. You cant define technology as making just 1 thing easier or faster. Because technology is an ever growing entity the uses to fix, calculate, repair, entertain, etc. are limitless. All it takes is an idea and the technology can be made. Of course it might take longer to produce good products but the possibilities to produce are there
     
  13. texancowgirl Registered Member

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    You may be right, but Technology is also far more combustible than the "old-school" industries such as agriculture, manufacturing or real estate. I realize all three of these industries have also experienced a downturn but it took decades, whereas something like MySpace grew quickly and will die quickly.

    hotfixupdate.blogspot.com
     
  14. weiguxp Wikichem.net - WikiChem Registered Senior Member

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    i hope they turn their attention to free websites.. wikipedia is a good idea

    ------
    wikichem.net
     
  15. kmguru Staff Member

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    wikipedia will not die anytime soon...technology like microprocessor has been around since 1970s and will remain for the next 50 years...it may change from pure silicon transistor to optical computers...basic hardware foundations are still there....memory, display technologies, even the lowly keyboard....etc.

    Agriculture has changed ...from poking finger to put a seed (USAID teaches to use a stick instead for food security in Africa) to GPS controlled automated combines.....

    BTW: Technology is not computers....
     
  16. kmguru Staff Member

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