More like ... we have lots of evidence that handing a small handful of essentially random people a large and disproportionate concentration of humanity's entire wealth tends to make them:<p>* act above the law<p>* use their wealth to attack and generally bully others to get their way<p>* exert disproportionate influence (relative to their actual insight or utility of their actions) on people's lives, government, and society as a whole<p>* choose other winners and losers in the market (this is not inherently good or bad, but when bad it is disproportionately bad)<p>* decide what things the rest of humanity should pay more or less attention to<p>* consume exorbitantly in the face of still-existent human poverty, disease, security, environmental concerns, and so on<p>and most directly<p>* decide how and to whom that wealth will be distributed long after they've "earned" it, thus continuing a cycle of haves and have nots<p>And so based on that evidence, all things being equal, having less concentration of wealth and more equity is better for society as a whole. (See: Friedman, Piketty, Smith, Keynes, George, et al)<p>Whatever argument you may have about this billionaire or that billionaire, hopefully it's easy to understand why we as a society should be exceptionally wary of the negative impacts of encouraging overly concentrated wealth versus the positive benefits of encouraging risktaking and entrepreneurial reward.
The video raises some very good points, most important of those is that the only thing we can be sure about is that <i>billionaires care about what other people think of them</i>. Everything else has an extremely high probability of being PR bullshit.<p>People are gullible as fuck. It seems like stupidity (defined as taking things at face value without questioning them) is a very desirable quality in the modern society, and apparently, even asking questions and raising points about underlying motives in considered unacceptable.
For HN, likely better to cite a text-based source or post a accurate/unbiased TLDR, since in my experience videos rarely get traction. Here’s related opinion piece that number of papers published and is cited in video:<p>OPINION: Finally, a billionaire willing to smack back at capitalism<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33223639" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33223639</a><p>* Note: Above post was flagged after 50-mins.<p>And the related prior HN thread on Patagonia founder giving away the company:<p>- <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32842357" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32842357</a>
Am I the only one who initially thought the guy in the video* was Alton Brown (of <i>Good Eats</i>), somehow rejuvenated?<p>* Adam Conover, with whom I wasn't previously familiar
Really?<p>This is like saying “All poor people are criminals”<p>This is the sort of thinking you need to leave behind in childhood. There is no way a reasonable grown adult can hold this opinion seriously.