karlheinz

“Let a 1,000 flowers bloom. Then rip 999 of them out by the roots.”

This is paraphrasing of Chairman Mao:

"The policy of letting a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend is designed to promote the flourishing of the arts and the progress of science"

And the ripping out by roots part brings labor camps to mind:

"After this brief period of liberalization, Mao abruptly changed course. The crackdown continued through 1957 as an Anti-Rightist Campaign against those who were critical of the regime and its ideology. Those targeted were publicly criticized and condemned to prison labor camps."

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

Can you please point to the section where this evidence is provided?

Last paragraph in the wikipedia section:

"Research by the Oxford Martin School showed that employees engaged in "tasks following well-defined procedures that can easily be performed by sophisticated algorithms" are at risk of displacement. The study, published in 2013, shows that automation can affect both skilled and unskilled work and both high and low-paying occupations; however, low-paid physical occupations are most at risk.[7] However, according to a study published in McKinsey Quarterly[63] in 2015 the impact of computerization in most cases is not replacement of employees but automation of portions of the tasks they perform"

Oxford or McKinsey Quarterly, which source do you prefer?

I'm not the right person to answer this question.

My initial comment was an attempt to illustrate the fact that startup funders and VC's that get rich don't make innovations in a vacuum. They rely on a complex network of global labour, government funding, university research and the entire history of human knowledge.

Therefor I don't think funders and capital owners should feel so certain about their privilege to extract enormous amounts of private wealth for the prize of rising income inequality.

Some classic examples:

* TCP/IP (USDOD)

* HTTP and HTML (CERN)

* The initial research for the Google algorithm (NSF)

* Compaq and Intel’s early stage funds (SBIR)

* Tesla was launched with a $500m guaranteed government loan

In fact, 77 out of the most important 88 innovations between 1971 and 2006 (rated by R&D Magazine’s annual awards) were fully dependent on US federal government support (1)

(1) http://ser.oxfordjournals.org/content/7/3/459.abstract

The wealth that PG and his friends accumulate through app startups does not come from nowhere. The millions of dollars that make a handful of men rich depends on extracting value out of:

1) Government funding. GPS, the Internet, touch screens and the CPU. All funded by government research where the tax dollars contributed by each and every citizen is the investment capital.

2) Global cheap labour. Miners in Africa (mining litium for batteries for example) and factory workers in china provides the infrastructrue for YC startups to make enormous profits.

3) Open source software. Unpaid labour provides the free tools that a startup need to "grow fast" without much investments.

Most people involved in 1-3 don't see any return on their investments. Something to think about.

The only solution to homelessness is to abolish the class structure that is fundamental to capitalism. Our current model of private ownership has encouraged the ruling class to grab enormous amounts of land, because of it's speculative value on the realestate market. Look at a place like New York, homelessness has in recent years reached the highest levels since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Still plenty of aparments are empty. Does this seem rational to anyone?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/07/nyregion/more-apartments-a...

I definitely think he did

js-csp enables go-like concurrency in javascript: https://github.com/ubolonton/js-csp

This is a paradox rooted in capitalism itself, as Karl Marx pointed out in 1858:

"Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth."