Walmart $482B in revenue a year
State Grid $329B
China Natural Petroleum $299B
Sinopec $294B
Shell $272B
ExxonMobil $246B
Volkswagen $236B
Toyota $236B
Apple $233B
BP $255B
Six oil companies and two car companies. Trillions of dollars in revenue every year, from oil and other fossil fuels. They have massive think tanks, government lobbyists, media and PR reach etc. They're the center of the world economy and world power.
Yet this climate denier ("I'm not really a climate denier!") writes for the Wall Street Journal (Rupert Murdoch's financial publications are a great place for peer reviewed science - well this guy is a poli-sci major anyhow) about how he is being persecuted by powerful forces.
Please. These people are so out of control they're going to burn up the world. I see someone who mentioned the California droughts, Tennessee etc. was downvoted.
The inertia of these companies at the center of the world economy is to keep doing what they're doing, which is suicidal. Solar etc. has advanced to where changes can be made which are less drastic than expected, but not with this fellow and his supporters here.
As America is going to shit, it's expected that even the silver lining of Silicon Valley's vanguard here are blind to reality and swallow some poli-sci majors climate denial propaganda to Murdoch's paper instead of reading peer-reviewed scientific papers. It goes along with the downward trajectory of the US - the low US growth, crummy unicorns etc. Our incoming pussy-grabbing president used this assessment as his campaign platform, and I agree with him to the limited extent that America is no longer a great country.
I have to cast my eyes to the People's Republic of China to see not only robust growth, but the solar, nuclear and other renewable energy sources. Along with their enormous economic growth over the past few decades, it will be the Chinese who will save things for us, while Americans stumble into the muck of Trump, climate denial and what you can see going on here.
Using Hacker News primarily for political, ideological, or religious controversy is an abuse of the site. Those things drown out what we want here, which is thoughtful conversation and intellectual curiosity.
Since we asked you to stop doing this and you didn't, we've banned your account.
We're happy to unban accounts that people give us reason to believe will follow the site rules in the future, so if you'd like to fix this, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com. But please don't create new accounts to break the site rules with.
One of the great men of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. That he will be vilified by the soon-to-be-led-by-Trump empire to his north, and Cuba's old idle class, which now lives in Florida, is a given. The empire's last outpost in Guantanamo Bay is where the empire takes other anti-imperialists it has kidnapped and holds them indefinitely without any sort of trial or Geneva convention procedure, and tortures and waterboards them. How different it is in the Cuba outside there, where Castro maintained his country's independence, and saw to the needs of all his country's people. While maintaining a large force of international health aid workers around the world, as well as aiding in such conflicts as the fight against the apartheid South African invasion of Angola.
It is amazing that a small island could defy the empire to his north for half a century. Such courage is probably what caused Khrushchev to send him nuclear missiles when talk of invasion of the rebelling perceived colony became widespread in the US. Courage, fortitude, the love of the people and international solidarity helped maintain the Cuban people's defiance of and independence from the empire which is soon to be Trump's.
> It seems reasonable to argue that bail-outs for banks amid broad woes for workers led to a loss of confidence in the system.
Well that's one thing. We were told abolishing Glass-Steagall needed to be done because it was only something liberals who like big government wanted and was a 66 year old relic of the New Deal. Then the bankers come to the taxpayers 9 years later and demand to be bailed out because they're now "too big to fail" and if they're not handed a fortune of the taxpayers money quickly with little debate, the world economy would collapse.
> Perhaps it is something like this: Each of these millions sees that he can thus exchange his tiny know-how for the goods and services he needs or wants.
If everybody is working in this process, then where do the people who expropriate the most from this process - the idle class heirs - get their profits?
> There is a fact still more astounding: the absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work.
The invisible hand...this is Adam Smith being misquoted. Adam Smith did use the metaphor of an invisible hand - Smith said the invisible hand was something that blocked free trade, not facilitated it. L. Read is using the metaphor in the exact opposite manner in which it was proposed.
Also, much of this could be said about a pencil being made in the USSR. Did any one person in the Soviet Union know how to make an entire pencil, from tree to graphite and such? Perhaps some government bureaucrat looked at his charts and ordered it to be made, but how different is that than the corporate bureaucrat looking at his charts and ordering pencils to be made?
Also, in our era of TARP bank bailouts, quantitative easing, farm subsidies and such, this notion of say the US government not having a central role in the economy as it exists is absurd. This medium we read and type on now was created through military contracts to Fairchild Semiconductor, DARPA grants for ARPAnet research and such, over many decades.
> The invisible hand...this is Adam Smith being misquoted. Adam Smith did use the metaphor of an invisible hand - Smith said the invisible hand was something that blocked free trade, not facilitated it.
Though he's indeed wrong in saying that the "invisible hand" acts only as to hamper trade, he isn't far off. The only use of the expression "invisible hand" in The Wealth of Nations occurs amid the discussion of why investors and traders might be biased towards their home country, which is still a discussed issue [0][1] and is considered a kind of market failure.
But nowhere in the same passage does Smith's use of the expression suggest that the "invisible hand" would act merely to hamper trade, but that this simile generally describes an unintended outcome of a decentralized process. The action of the invisible hand might not be necessarily beneficial, as it isn't in this case.
> If everybody is working in this process, then where do the people who expropriate the most from this process - the idle class heirs - get their profits?
The 'idle' class is not actually 'idle', and if they are then usually their parents were not 'idle'.
> The invisible hand...this is Adam Smith being misquoted. Adam Smith did use the metaphor of an invisible hand - Smith said the invisible hand was something that blocked free trade, not facilitated it. L. Read is using the metaphor in the exact opposite manner in which it was proposed.
I don't know what you are talking about
'Every individual... neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it... he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.' - Adam Smith
> Also, much of this could be said about a pencil being made in the USSR. Did any one person in the Soviet Union know how to make an entire pencil, from tree to graphite and such? Perhaps some government bureaucrat looked at his charts and ordered it to be made, but how different is that than the corporate bureaucrat looking at his charts and ordering pencils to be made?
That is true, but the point of the story is not to say that markets are the only way to make something. The point of the story is to show the complexity of a simple object, in order to illustrate how complicate the overall system is. The implication is that you need markets because of the extrem difficulty of getting at this information.
The USSR could do it, all things consider, they could not do it well. They did actually use lots of markets, property rights and intensives to achieve this, just worst version of it. Central planning as envisioned by Trosky, Lenin, Bukharin, Bauer and co is so impossible that it is impossible to enforce, people will automatically start working around the inefficacy of the system.
> Also, in our era of TARP bank bailouts, quantitative easing, farm subsidies and such, this notion of say the US government not having a central role in the economy as it exists is absurd. This medium we read and type on now was created through military contracts to Fairchild Semiconductor, DARPA grants for ARPAnet research and such, over many decades.
A central role and a central plan is not the same thing. Planning is about direction, and you can say lots about the US government but they don't point the economy in a particular direction, usually they try to stop the economy from changing.
Point out that government has invested in successful stuff is not really relevant. The US was the most successful and innovative economic power on the planet when the federal government had less then 2% of GDP. Nobody denies that lots of industry developed faster because because of government, but many other developed slower as well. Where does this leave you?
> The 'idle' class is not actually 'idle', and if they are then usually their parents were not 'idle'
Heirs who do not work and live off the profits of worker's labor are idle. Certainly their parents are idle as well. If that were not the case there wouldn't be phrases like nouveau riche and old money. You can watch billionaire heir Jamie Johnson's documentaries to see more with regards to this.
> 'Every individual... neither intends to promote...'
Precisely. You're quoting from Book IV, Chapter II of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. The chapter is titled "Of Restraints upon the Importation from Foreign Countries of such Goods as can be Produced at Home". Meaning restraints on international free trade.
It's opening sentence is "By restraining, either by high duties or by absolute prohibitions, the importation of such goods from foreign countries as can be produced at home, the monopoly of the home market is more or less secured to the domestic industry employed in producing them."
The part you quote says fully:
"As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it."
The end being promoted by the invisible hand is as the only sentence discussing the invisible hand opens with "by preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry". The means to do that are described in the chapter title "of Restraints upon the Importation from Foreign Countries of such Goods as can be Produced at Home" through means described in the chapter's first sentence and elsewhere "by restraining, either by high duties or by absolute prohibitions, the importation of such goods from foreign countries as can be produced at home, the monopoly of the home market is more or less secured to the domestic industry employed in producing them".
It's not hard to see how the notion of the invisible hand has been twisted to its exact opposite meaning, as even when people point this fact out, they ignore the text and continue on with the meaning they think it has...
> The USSR could do it, all things consider, they could not do it well...Central planning as envisioned by Trosky, Lenin, Bukharin, Bauer and co is so impossible that it is impossible to enforce, people will automatically start working around the inefficacy of the system.
Actually the USSR economy functioned very well under Stalin. While the west was mired in the Great Depression, the USSR was growing by leaps and bounds. European (and even American) workers moved to Russia to get work, as did European (and American) firms. It managed to beat off a German invasion and raise the red flag in Berlin. By 1957 it was launching satellites and doing other such innovations ahead of the west. Nonetheless, in 1956 Khrushchev announced various major changes, including a decrease in capital allocation percentages, something which also happened in other Comecon countries. Those changes and other things did lead to stagnation, but they were a shift. In fact the Chinese stated so at a time, and eventually broke from the Russians due to this revisionism.
> Planning is about direction, and you can say lots about the US government but they don't point the economy in a particular direction
Of course it does. The direction was and is set out by DARPA, NSF, NIH. Who is funding the Boston Dynamics robots (answer: DARPA)? Who is providing money to SpaceX (answer: NASA)? Who is providing Boeing with revenues for the R&D necessary to build airplanes (Boeing is the second largest military contractor in the world)? Who is funding CRISPR/Cas9 research?
> The US was the most successful and innovative economic power on the planet when the federal government had less then 2% of GDP.
A number of factors are at play with this. One is that settlers arrived fairly historically recently in the US, gaining over 9 million square kilometers of land, much of it resourceful, plus the bonus of two big oceans to protect it. That in itself is quite a big windfall, a large European country like France is 5% of the size of the USA. Countries like Argentina has a similar trajectory, but 2 out of 3 Argentinians have indigenous heritage, whereas Americans killed almost all of the native population and took their land (about 1% of Americans have native heritage). Other factors are at play, but being handed over the equivalent of 20 Frances with two big oceans around it can do a lot to help one be a successful economic power.
One thing missing from the list: a real worker's movement that is threatening to the wealthy.
People remember the Russian Revolution toward the end of World War I, what they tend to forget is that Hungary had a revolution and became a Soviet republic in 1919. Many things happened happened in different European countries at that time.
Germany had an attempt communist revolution starting in October of 1918 which went on for months, you could even say years.
So in four years you see an increasingly powerful communist party going from getting one in ten German votes to one in six German votes. You also have communists and socialists outnumbering Nazis. Unfortunately for the left, the Catholic Center party got 11% of the vote, and after the Reichstag fire, the Nazi seizure of power occurred, and the the Center party voted for the enabling act and the de facto Nazi seizure of power became de jure.
But it was prompted by 37% of voters being reds, and 16% of voters being communists. Red voters outnumbered brown voters.
In Italy, the 1922 march on Rome followed the Biennio Rosso. The working class tried to take over and failed, and the fascists took over.
Returning to red power in Germany at the turn of 1932/1933 - on February 20, 1933, Hitler met with representatives of German industry - Gustav Krupp, Fritz Springorum from Hoesch, an IG Farben board member, Fritz von Opel, a board member of Siemens etc. In the midst of stormtroopers taking over the streets he asked them to bankroll the Nazis in the upcoming elections so they could pass the enabling act. German industry bankrolled the Nazis, because they feared the 37% red workers (the majority of the working class) and the rising power of the KPD.
The situation is nothing like that in the US. If anything, the little existing of the worker's movement is disintegrating - Michigan and Wisconsin just became right to work states. Board members of the Fortune 100 are not going to bankroll a party like the Nazis. There's no left to fight. The wealthy and upper middle class are becoming increasingly liberal, as there's no socialist movement to worry about, in comparison to 20th century Europe.
I appreciate your careful reply here. You have pointed out a lot of useful historical background, in particular, the fear the German industrialists had for the Communist party, and the fact that the Nazi party never had great success at the ballot box.
Certainly the US situation is different (no potent workers' movement to fear).
But elements of the wealthy Right are fearful of national health care, environmental regulation, the costs that might come from climate change. They see great advantages in changing tax rates. These fears and forces could play a similar role to fear of a workers' movement.
Various powerful interest groups lobby and shove economic capture for themselves into these deals, transferring power over these matters from American voters to some international group looking over their interest.
The TPP is chock full of economic capture goodies which have nothing to do with free trade.
One person who has been clear-headed about this for weeks is Michael Moore. Michigan and Wisconsin were supposed to be in the bag for Hillary, but that looks like where the surprise swing is coming from. Moore said from on the ground it felt like white working class people suffering from deindustrialization felt Hillary would do little for them, and might pick up the Molotov cocktail of Trump to throw into the system. His comments have been in lots of pro-Trump videos for weeks. Looks like he was right.
Many of the people on HN are in their twenties, some of us are slightly older.
In 1963, the Ku Klux Klan bombed a black church in Birmingham and killed four little girls, because the church supported the rights of blacks to vote. Blacks were still banned from attending University of Alabama in that year, the governor himself stood in the school's door to block the first student trying to attend, blocked by federal marshals. In 1964 three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi, with the help of local police. In 1961, groups riding on integrated buses in the south were attacked in several places, with the help of police, beaten to a pulp and the buses burned.
Even in the north - in 1965 Martin Luther King went on a march in Chicago against de facto segregated housing, which was met by what seemed to be a forming mob, he was hit by a brick and the white and black marchers were met with projectiles and feared a riot might ensue.
If you look at the Fox News viewer demographics, much of their audience were in their 20s and 30s when this was all happening. They grew up with it that way.
This isn't ancient history to some of us, and is American history. You go back farther and it is jim crow, lynching, and not all too far back, about 30 years before my grandfather was born, slavery.
Considering this, seeing blacks relegated to Oakland (which is itself being gentrified) and lacking in the makeup of startups in San Francisco is not surprising. Things have in some ways gotten better, but black men are still killed for little or no reason. Look at the case of Amadou Diallo, who was shot 41 times for opening his door - the police brass have been editing his entry on Wikipedia with exposed IPs, which has led to a little kerfuffle. So they're being paid by working taxpayers to rewrite history any how...
Particularly the part where he talks about commodities and products, and the process and relations of production at early Apple.
I think what much of what Holt says will go over the heads of people not in the milieu of Holt, Proyect etc. Not all of it will though.
One reason I find the Holt piece interesting is everyone else seems to come at the question from the same angle. Holt does not, but more importantly Jobs did not. Also Holt was there when Apple was incorporated, and had a very thoughtful sociological Weltanschauung back then.
You can tell everyone comes at it from the same angle by the OP title. How Steve Jobs became a billionaire. People who start from that point, a desire to get insanely rich and spend money and be admired, will probably never get to be be billionaire. I don't think that they'll get it either.
Most people like Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page etc. don't seem to be focused on wealth. Even someone like Larry Ellison who seems to be focused on wealth gets more stirred up talking about engineering one of the first usable relational databases than he does about his billions.
The US is in such a homogeneous ideological fog that it is easy to miss the forest for the trees. Holt was around when Apple started, but was not a participant in what C. Wright Mills called the great American celebration, so I find his viewpoint interesting, and in my opinion, more insightful than any other I've heard.
Yet this climate denier ("I'm not really a climate denier!") writes for the Wall Street Journal (Rupert Murdoch's financial publications are a great place for peer reviewed science - well this guy is a poli-sci major anyhow) about how he is being persecuted by powerful forces.
Please. These people are so out of control they're going to burn up the world. I see someone who mentioned the California droughts, Tennessee etc. was downvoted.
The inertia of these companies at the center of the world economy is to keep doing what they're doing, which is suicidal. Solar etc. has advanced to where changes can be made which are less drastic than expected, but not with this fellow and his supporters here.
As America is going to shit, it's expected that even the silver lining of Silicon Valley's vanguard here are blind to reality and swallow some poli-sci majors climate denial propaganda to Murdoch's paper instead of reading peer-reviewed scientific papers. It goes along with the downward trajectory of the US - the low US growth, crummy unicorns etc. Our incoming pussy-grabbing president used this assessment as his campaign platform, and I agree with him to the limited extent that America is no longer a great country.
I have to cast my eyes to the People's Republic of China to see not only robust growth, but the solar, nuclear and other renewable energy sources. Along with their enormous economic growth over the past few decades, it will be the Chinese who will save things for us, while Americans stumble into the muck of Trump, climate denial and what you can see going on here.