But I’m sure he secretly enjoyed the praise somewhat.

Reading your comment, it sounds like you've got a decent amount of social status without needing to explicitly pursue it.

While that's great for you, don't forget that for others, increased status can mean:

- No longer being treated like shit by people who get away with it

- A social circle that doesn't constantly try to take advantage of you

- Security in your job, as well as greater opportunities for promotion

- Positive attention from the opposite sex

- Peer acceptance for your children

In places like China or India, there is indeed a very big difference in QoL between those who have status and/or social power and those who do not.

That being said, it might be better to change your environment (and the people who you surround yourself with), because that will change your status as TFA outlines — without you having to go out of your way to change who you are and what you do.

Easier said than done when this involves changing countries, but it's a long-term strat.

Independent of changing countries, this can be hard to do. Changing peer groups means being accepted by the new group you want to join. For example (within a first-world country), a lower middle-class person looking to join an upper middle-class group will find that they have the wrong taste in clothes, food, books and films, live in the wrong postcode and most likely not have the economic means to "keep up with the Joneses" the way upper middle-class people do.

God knows what someone from, say, the tribal regions of Pakistan would need to do to be accepted as middle-class in a first-world country. It's more than a plane ticket - it's a complete lack of exposure to Western media/culture.

> the highest paid and smartest among us wear rainbow hats with propellers.

It works because they enjoy status from performance and accomplishments. Also suiting up often becomes a negative sign in our circles, and getting away with rough presentation can be a sign of status.

Would you call such a thing a status symbol? Something glorified in certain circles and disregarded in others?

The author clearly explained that removing yourself from status games just ends up putting you in a different status game (his metalhead days).

The reality is that you have many statuses irrespective of whether you want it or not merely as a function of being in a group. I suppose by not being in any groups you would accrue status among people that value that too.

For whatever value of "good" applies in that particular social network, yes. But that value of "good" might not be anything we would call "good" in ordinary language.

For example, Bill Gates does have high status, but he has it because he is rich, not because of the particular things he did that made him rich. Those things happened to be reasonably beneficial (how much so depends on your opinion of Windows and Microsoft, and opinions on that can...vary), but many other rich people got that way by doing things that were not. Yet they still get status according to their wealth.

Most people who make money are providing a service to many people, or to someone else with a lot of money (who therefore provided value previously). Care to provide a counterexample?

And then there's multigenerational wealth. Rich brats don't provide intrinsic value, but they're born rich. They don't get that way by providing value. Their ancestors may have stolen their wealth, so they didn't get there by providing value either.

Wealth preservation is something that doesn’t get talked about - imo this is what the rich kids should be schooled in assuming they aren’t good enough to multiply their wealth like Elon. They keep it together for a future generation to take advantage of.

That's your claim, not ours. Cotton plantation owners made obscene profits from the literal blood of slaves. Did the plantation owners create the value? No, the slaves did. Did the slaves enjoy multiple generations of exponential growth of their net worth? No, the plantation owners were paid reparations, and the slaves got nothing. Descendents of plantation owners are strongly represented in Southern business and politics to this very day. Not because their ancestors made value but because they took it.

You seem to confuse "money" with "value."

I am 100% against slavery, period.

Who invented the incandescent lightbulb and the iPhone? The mass market automobile? Who built the railroads? None of these things can be fully credited to the small number of people at the top of the corporations responsible, but we can say fairly confidently they wouldn't have happened without a visionary leader aggregating the efforts of many into a final product.

I agree slaves were deprived of freedom and wages, which is not right. And that wealth is stolen.

That is different from the fact that it's been passed down through generations. I don't quarrel with the children of entrepreneurs having wealth passed down in the same way.

Conflating two arguments makes discussion more difficult.

Money and value are directly related. Money is just score keeping for value created. People pay money for things they value. That's not always going to be the case, but I think treating it as a rule with exceptions is a better heuristic than... what is your definition of value versus money?

> Money is just score keeping for value created.

Yes and no. It's way more complicated than that. As demonstrated with the slavery example (nobody accused you of being pro-slavery, please chill), money is often score-keeping for handling money. People with power who participate in large transactions take a cut for themselves. In the case of slavery, the plantation owners got rich by what we consider outright theft today. Money and power follows their descendants, and for what? Did they create value? No, they're just rich off the proceeds of slavery.

Take Mozilla for example: developers are, by and large, the greatest value-creators at the company. So why does Mitchell Baker make $2.5M a year? What great value is she creating? Is she secretly an honest-to-goodness 10x developer? I see no evidence of such -- but because she's closest to the money, she makes decisions about the money, and folks at the board (who are, typically, CEOs at other orgs) agree that people who are closest to the money deserve to get the most money. In this example, the accumulation of wealth is not a record of created value but it's a record of power.

My definition of value is rather irrelevant. There is no universal definition, and I'd say that any precise definition is flawed. Especially one so simple as "value == money".

You don't think the CEO of Mozilla is providing value?

I realize I'm sitting in idealistic terms, and it's to describe a point of view I'm not sure you fully understand. But at this point, I don't think it's that you don't understand it, you just don't care for the framework I'm describing. Perhaps you feel it's not important or useful to your life. I have found it to be a helpful lens, while certainly not all encompassing of the truth.

I had a more nuanced point I was going to make about slavery, hence the preface, but I realized it was probably not the right time or place.

I wholly disagree. According to the money=value definition, if I sell identical items at two prices, the one with the higher price is the better value. This is patently stupid. And people fall for it in droves, so I think it's dangerously stupid.

> You don't think the CEO of Mozilla is providing value?

In my personal opinion, I think she's driving the ship to ground; I'm fairly convinced that actions by the company under her watch have steeply reduced the value of the company. But, that isn't really what I said previously: I question if she's providing 10x the value of a senior developer -- this is a general question applicable to most executive salaries today. In the money=value paradigm, she's being paid that much and therefore she's obviously that valuable. Which, I hope you see why I think that's laughably foolish.

Can't say much about the hypothetical wealth stealing since it's completely hypothetical.

That's a bit of a straw man there.

The classic target for these corporate raiders is a business whose capital (real estate, equipment, IP etc.) is worth more than the total market cap of the business itself (which, for most established businesses is a proxy for profit).

In this way, the typical corporate raider buys up a business who is using a valuable asset inefficiently, sells their capital to other businesses who can make more productive use of it, and line their pockets with the value differential they created.

In the process, they'll generally fuck over a whole lot of workers, but there is real economic value (not necessarily social good) in this process of capital redistribution.

No, it isn't. See below.

> In the process, they'll generally fuck over a whole lot of workers

The only way they can do that, since the workers' pensions were an obligation of the company that got broken up, is to declare that company bankrupt and void the obligation. But bankruptcy is not supposed to be a way to make money by voiding a company's obligations and then selling off its capital. The net value of the company is its assets minus its obligations; the process of cashing out the company should involve paying the obligations, not voiding them.

> there is real economic value (not necessarily social good) in this process of capital redistribution

Now who is using a straw man? Again, the "economic value" in a company is its assets minus its obligations. Cashing in on the assets while voiding the obligations is not creating "real economic value". It's stealing it from the people to whom the obligations were owed.

I repeat: nobody was arguing that people losing their pensions was a good thing. Nobody. Absolutely nobody. Literally no-one.

I don't even know what you're referencing, or how it's even possible for Private Equity to pilfer workers' pension funds. If anything, it's the funds themselves that own/invest in Private Equity.

Yet still, you and the other poster have brought it up as if stealing pension funds (how?) is somehow "what Private Equity does".

You might as well be arguing that Private Equity destroys value because it's immoral to fuck a dog. I'm sure Carl Icahn-esque character has tried it before.

As for how pension heists are accomplished, read up: https://sandiegofreepress.org/2012/07/how-mitt-romney-drove-...

But Bill Gates did that after he already had status. He didn't gain status by doing that.

Looking at Apple, Oracle, Google etc -- how likely does that seem

It depends on the version of Windows as well.

I've done my share of social-good tech companies, as well as engineer's dream-job stuff. After reflecting on this article, I realized that:

1. I finally enjoy my tech job after I stopped chasing the status game in tech.

2. I finally enjoy my hobbies after I stopped chasing the status game in those hobbies too!

I wish things were different on the social-good front. I just try to do good whenever I can in the regular day-to-day world, plus some donations here and there.

Are you sure about this though? It seems like you are referring to a bunch of Software Engineers. That's nowhere near wealthiest.