Hacker News: UncleMeat

New comment by UncleMeat in "White House delays US voting-machine vulnerability report"

UncleMeat — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 14:16:12 +0000

Did Clinton claim that she actually won?

New comment by UncleMeat in "Never talk to the police"

UncleMeat — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 21:45:50 +0000

Don't worry. If the lawyers prosecuting you illegally point out your silence as suspicious to the jury, the supreme court can just decide that actually this didn't impact the jury enough so your conviction stands. Great country we live in /s.

New comment by UncleMeat in "How to earn a billion dollars"

UncleMeat — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 16:36:34 +0000

Why would Musk be stuck babysitting PayPal? He would have earned money while laboring there. He can choose to do something different if he wants to, just like anybody else with a job.

New comment by UncleMeat in "How to earn a billion dollars"

UncleMeat — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 16:35:00 +0000

Of course there are side effects. The question is whether those side effects are worth the benefits we'd get.

Millions dead every year from TB. A curable disease.

New comment by UncleMeat in "How to earn a billion dollars"

UncleMeat — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 11:49:51 +0000

I don’t find “we need billionaires because 401ks” to be a compelling argument. We can build a different system.

AOC’s criticism is that “own stock, share in gains” is not the same as earning money.

New comment by UncleMeat in "How to earn a billion dollars"

UncleMeat — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 11:47:42 +0000

It is factual that ownership continues to pay after you are no longer laboring.

My position is that this is not a good thing.

New comment by UncleMeat in "How to earn a billion dollars"

UncleMeat — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 10:58:47 +0000

Solve? Likely not. Improve? Of course. Policies that improve the state of problems even if they remain unsolved are good.

More than one million people die of TB annually. We have a cure for it. Elon Musk could pay for testing and treatment distribution for the entire world without noticing a change in his wealth.

A million people a year.

New comment by UncleMeat in "How to earn a billion dollars"

UncleMeat — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 10:56:45 +0000

I have never met a founder who was motivated, even in part, by the possibility of being a mega billionaire.

New comment by UncleMeat in "How to earn a billion dollars"

UncleMeat — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 10:52:18 +0000

You can believe that’s fair. I don’t. I don’t believe that one party needs to be at fault for an economic transaction to be unfair.

I live in a country where “oopsy doopsy your insurance denied this so now you owe us 20,000” isn’t terribly uncommon and your employer can fire you without any warning or severance. “I need money for the rent this month” is not consistently some moral failing.

New comment by UncleMeat in "How to earn a billion dollars"

UncleMeat — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 17:43:43 +0000

Most people need money to eat. I don't know if you can ever really have a fair negotiation with an employer when "the rent is due" is involved. You know those companies that buy settlements from people in exchange for a fraction of their value immediately? You could say that this is a fair trade in an econ 101 sense that body parties rationally entered into a mutual agreement. But you could also notice that one person just got laid off and doesn't have enough money to pay rent and is therefore pressured by circumstance to accept extremely unfavorable terms because the alternative is homelessness.

New comment by UncleMeat in "How to earn a billion dollars"

UncleMeat — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 17:39:28 +0000

Bill Gates' wealth grew much more after he left Microsoft than while he was CEO. Was that wealth earned through innovation? No. He simply owned something that became more valuable as other people labored to innovate.

New comment by UncleMeat in "How to earn a billion dollars"

UncleMeat — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 17:38:22 +0000

Compound growth is also the exact thing that is being criticized here. Your wealth grows simply by virtue of ownership. No labor needs to be performed. When somebody says that you can't earn a billion dollars they are the same thing that PG is saying, he just doesn't think it is bad: the way to become a billionaire is to own things whose value rises over time. The issue is whether this can be meaningfully called "earning" it.

New comment by UncleMeat in "Elon Musk is a real-life Bond villain"

UncleMeat — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 12:28:44 +0000

Used a ton of his money to get republicans elected so that he could get an illegal position within the government to illegally cut oodles of programs leading to the unnecessary deaths of a huge number of people?

Posts online advocating for a race war on a nearly continuous basis.

New comment by UncleMeat in "Elon Musk Becomes First Trillionaire as SpaceX Starts Trading"

UncleMeat — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 18:14:04 +0000

I don't believe that it does. Billionaires and even millionaires don't typically have that amount in a bank account. People understand this.

New comment by UncleMeat in "Elon Musk Becomes First Trillionaire as SpaceX Starts Trading"

UncleMeat — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 01:41:31 +0000

So? Imagine he sells all his ownership and this tanks the value of his companies by 90%. Oh no. He only has $100,000,000,000 in the bank. Enough to be ludicrously rich a thousand times over.

I have never once understood this "oh it is only paper money" argument.

New comment by UncleMeat in "SpaceX's president is floating a Tesla merger as the company begins trading"

UncleMeat — Sat, 13 Jun 2026 01:36:10 +0000

If they are useful for humanoid robots, why aren't they useful for self driving cars, which are just robots of a different shape?

New comment by UncleMeat in "Elon Musk Becomes First Trillionaire as SpaceX Starts Trading"

UncleMeat — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 17:50:57 +0000

Not if people continue to have the 100x premium on Musk. Puts only make sense if the market returns to rationality.

New comment by UncleMeat in "SpaceX's president is floating a Tesla merger as the company begins trading"

UncleMeat — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:23:16 +0000

But why are robots and LLMs connected? The only reason why a robot feels more connected to AI than a self driving car is science fiction.

New comment by UncleMeat in "Why I'm Forced to Say Farewell: Google Management Has Lost Its Moral Compass"

UncleMeat — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 02:02:46 +0000

Damore had been aggressively arguing about this stuff internally for some time in advance of his doc. The doc was consistent with a pattern of "makes a huge stink of things in every training and refuses to back down."

New comment by UncleMeat in "The U.S. Is Terrorizing Cuba to Make Rich Men Richer"

UncleMeat — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:02:27 +0000

Oh yes. We've seen so many US invasions for the purpose of regime change end up with prosperity for the citizens of those countries.