One mistake pg makes here is assuming that to be an exploitative billionaire you have to be good at exploiting people or have personal manipulative qualities.
You don’t. Owning a large company in a capitalist system is inherently exploitative. Simply owning a large company and taking surplus value from a large number of people is exploitation.
I have little money but I write an amazing book and it sells to millions. Each books takes, say, $5 to print, and yet I sell it for $15. Therefore I end up wealthy from this endeavor.
Did I exploit the people who chose to buy my book? The people who printed it?
Did you personally sell millions of books on your own? Probably you used some service like amazon in order to sell those books and fulfil the orders, in this hypothetical, in which case the lefty argument would be that you are indirectly profiting from the exploitation of both amazon's workers and the employees of the printing company.
"Simply owning a large company and taking surplus value from a large number of people is exploitation."
Who are these large number of people? Customers or suppliers? In socialism, customers are usually held captive because of limited suppliers. In capitalism, suppliers are usually held captive because of fierce competition to get customers. Neither sounds inherent exploitation by the entrepreneur.
I believe that the claim is that the workers are exploited, because they produced value but received less than the value they produced. And that does sound like exploitation. But consider the alternative.
Let's say that every worker was paid for the full value that they produced. That would mean that the profit of every company was $0, because the workers got all the value produced. How many companies would we have? Probably not very many. Risk my capital to start a business, for a return of $0? Yeah, no. I'll pass. So will most people.
And that would mean that we wouldn't have the things that large businesses produce, from computers to airplanes to vaccines.
Even for the workers, is that a net win? I don't think so.
The concerned kind. Refusing to keep their mouth shut when others exploit the system.
This is a problem, here GP is a hero, a hacker, a free spirit. But there is no point in romanticizing such behavior.
If you find a vulnerability in a system, you disclose it to the people that should know about it.
You can do that anonymously, or you can alert people in a subtle way.
What you don't do is sit on it and brag to people what a clever person you are.
What the OP did is (in this case) irrelevant to what the asshole did. There were multiple ways he could have gone about dealing with the situation that did not involve fucking someone over, but he chose to do that instead.
I just cannot attribute something like that to altruism.
I was wondering when this one would come up.
"Snitches end up in ditches" mentality is at fault here.
You pretend that someone cracking everyone's password is not a problem that the organization should address or even know about.
We should not turn our gaze away. "This is not my problem" is simply not a correct response. Snowden knew that, and yet, some people call him a snitch and a traitor.
Ms. Wynne was drawn to math through her summer
neighbors on Cape Cod, Amie Wilkinson and Benson
Farb, who both teach at the University of Chicago
also, Amie Wilkinson seems to pursue publicity wherever she can get it (quanta, AMS, NY Times, ...). as in every other field, success in math depends on self-promotion and networking!
Usually if you say you're raising prices because they've been flat for years the implied justification is that it's to match inflation. But that doesn't apply to a percentage fee.
You don’t. Owning a large company in a capitalist system is inherently exploitative. Simply owning a large company and taking surplus value from a large number of people is exploitation.