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from the picthfork-futures-accelerate-to-new-highs dept.
Nick Hanauer, a self-described "plutocrat" says history shows that the current economic and governmental situation can't last, and the USA should should get busy changing before the system breaks down.
From the memo to his "Fellow Zillionaires":
I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. In cash. My friends and I own a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many ways I'm no different from you. Like you, I have a broad perspective on business and capitalism. And also like you, I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that the other 99.99 percent of Americans can't even imagine.
But let's speak frankly to each other. I'm not the smartest guy you've ever met, or the hardest-working. I was a mediocre student. I'm not technical at all - I can't write a word of code. What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future.
If we don't do something to fix the glaring inequities in this economy, the pitchforks are going to come for us. No society can sustain this kind of rising inequality. In fact, there is no example in human history where wealth accumulated like this and the pitchforks didn't eventually come out. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It's not if, it's when.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 03 2014, @11:53AM
What is he complaining about? He conned MS out of billions. I thought that was the way the system was supposed to work. Whoever runs the best scam gets paid. Look at all the companies Yahoo bought recently. Are any of them really worth anything? Venture capitalists are throwing money at Yo, an app that took 8 hours to write - couldn't any other messaging app add the same functionality in 8 hours? What is the value of this thing?
We live in a country where David Pogue passes himself off as a technology expert, Herbert Schildt passes himself off as a programming guru, and so on - they're all getting paid for the perception they create, not their abilities.
Most of these tech companies have no intrinsic worth. They have no revenue model, no realistic way to ever earn revenues, and are propped up by venture capital until they are sold. If you look at the VR company Facebook bought, it's all a scheme because FB was backed by the same venture capitalists, and a former VC involved with FB wrote a gushy piece at Wired about how great this deal was. They're just paying it forward.
Sure, I'd love for technology to be innovative, and for true innovation to be rewarded, but that's never really happened.