I've known and spent time with quite a few billionaires personally.
I can assure you, with the utmost in direct observation, that they are extraordinarily obsessed with money. It is, in fact, the defining characteristic of their entire existence, literally by definition.
Any argument to the contrary is profoundly hilarious. Imagine if you came across someone that had over one billion model trains in his basement who was claiming that he wasn't super interested in model trains.
This is missing the forest for the trees on the level of "I have spent time around photographers, and let me tell you, they are obsessed with lenses to the point that it defines their existence".
From a billionaire POV, money is what you use to build valuable things (what the lenses are to photographers). Unlike photography, it also happens to be the thing that the market rewards you with for doing a good job (although a successful photographer could convert their profit to new/better lenses).
I would eat my hat if you could find a single billionaire (outside trust fundees / inheritance) that is grinding it out doing something they hate, selling a product(s) they think is shit, all so they can hit whatever number, cash out, retire to a private island or whatever and never work again.
Let's phrase this a different way. Everyone has values that they live by.
Some people value family and community above all else. For example, even if their town has very little economic opportunity, they will stay there to support their grandparents, their parents, their cousins, and so on.
Some people might value artistic expression, and they will forsake money for the chance to be, let's say, a musician. They might become incredibly successful, or they might not, but they will always focus on playing music. That's the thing that they value whenever they have to make a choice. That one goes first.
Billionaires value money. I'm 100% certain of this. I've had a sort of interesting life and happen to have been quite close to and worked with at least twenty billionaires, some of whom I've known for decades and watched their progression. I'm telling you for certain that they value money incredibly highly.
This, of course, really should be obvious to even your average child or anyone who takes even a passing interest in the topic. A couple of million dollars here or there can be an oddball side effect of some luck or strange life choices. A billion dollars cannot, it is an absolutely staggering amount of money, and anyone who has achieved it has aggressively sought it out and has been given dozens, if not hundreds, of opportunities to focus on something else instead and settle for some large amount of money that is short of a billion dollars.
Again, this should not surprise anybody at all who has a functioning brain. Imagine Jane Goodall heads into the jungle to study a tribe of gorillas and discovers that most gorillas have a dozen or so bananas, but then discovers a gorilla with a pile of bananas several thousand feet tall.
How do you think she'd fare trying to make the argument that this gorilla was actually focused on other things besides bananas for most of their life and the pile just kind of happened as a side effect?
>then discovers a gorilla with a pile of bananas several thousand feet tall.
Then she didn't discover the billionaire gorilla, she discovered the lottery winner or the trust fund kid.
The billionaire gorilla has thousands of acres of banana trees, with enough bananas to reach the moon and back if all picked and stacked.
The billionaire gorilla is laser focused on generating bananas. A complex machine with fractal parts whose ultimate output is bananas.
Meanwhile the other gorillas are laser focused on the height of their banana stack (which is rotting and half aren't even aware). Telling themselves if they had a stack 1000ft high they would never work a day again.
I'm pretty sure you understand this, and part of me thinks we are saying the same thing.
I have a degree in economics and wrote my economics thesis on the application of complex adaptive systems to economic theory. I'm still quite attached to economic analysis, it's even the story behind my user name.
You can be assured I understand the concept of wealth creation.
But the fact that there are, in fact, other people involved here is hilariously hand-woven away here:
> He paid other people to help him and they were happy with that exchange. The government also helped them and they were happy with that exchange.
OK I will bite. Who determines what "the government" thinks in a democracy? The general public, right? Does the general public seem happy?
Is the general public happy? Who cares, it is not the job of the government to ensure happiness but rights.
Regardless:
1. Starlink is amazing (literally never want to fly on an airplane without it ever again, wish I could search for flights based on having it)
2. Starship is amazing. (ensures American space dominance for generations)
3. Being able to manufacture hard things at scale and employ hundreds of thousands of people and making thousands of millionaires is amazing for our economy!!
Unless they are fools, the general public should be stoked AF.
Yes, if you're the kind of person who just kind of thinks that Elon's stuff is really really cool, then that's fine. I have no reason to think your point of view is insincere. I have quite a few good friends who share it with you. And I strongly believe in your right to express it and to vote based on it.
With that said, it might also be instructive to realize that most people in the country are coming to fucking hate this bullshit. They're exhausted at the fact that our economy is now dominated by financial extraction and that nearly all of the resources of the country are accruing to a tiny group of people.
They're increasingly unable to afford housing in the places that they grew up. They're unable to raise their families. They're unable to have any sense of security or continuity in their life whatsoever.
And the best part is that they have to listen to people like you calling them fools for wanting to live healthy and productive lives, for valuing human connection over technology, for value and tradition over innovation. They get to be told that they're lazy for not having built some sort of financial engineering machine to extract money like you guys did.
The problem for you guys is there's a lot more of them than there are of you. At a certain point, they will kill you and eat you for your protein content.
It's happened quite a few times in history before. So good luck with all that.
If you want a tip, you might want to think about how we can harness the power of all this incredible innovation and still get exciting new toys and quality of life improvements while also having a society that's more balanced, fair, and healthy for all the participants, including the ones who aren't as smart or weren't born into money.
I don’t like it because it’s Elon (I literally have been an active litigation with him for years lol)
I like it because it’s useful.
Life is objectively much better today for the average person than it has been for 99% of humans in 99% of history.
(“They will kill us and eat us for our protein” makes you sound totally insane and in this ludicrous scenario I think the rich peoples army of drones/optimus robots would simply say “no”.)
> Life is objectively much better today for the average person than it has been for 99% of humans in 99% of history.
Life is objectively much worse for many communities in this country.
Get on a plane to Detroit if you don't understand what I'm talking about.
We allowed one of the most powerful and sophisticated industrial economies in history to be taken over by bankers who shipped the jobs to a different country, bought off our politicians, and spend most of their time coming up with new ways to use monopolies to overcharge us for shit.
You can talk about 99% of history all day long, but if you're standing in a town and the stores are boarded up and the jobs are all gone, or alternately, if you have to move further and further away from the community that you were born in because you can't afford to live in the same neighborhood that your parents raised you in, then you're not interested in statistics or people telling you it's the best we've ever had it.
Yep, this is it. This is the fundamental disconnect in our culture. Who do you mean by "we"? And why do you think that Detroit being increasingly unaffordable is a sign that things are going well for working people? Huh?
For a large group of working people you are definitely wrong about this, and the signs of the crisis are literally everywhere in our politics right now, but if you can't see it, I can't make you see it.
Perhaps file this conversation in the back of your head as you go about your business in the coming weeks and months, and see if you can see any examples of what I'm talking about after all.
Instead of taking me at my word, just consider it as a hypothesis that you'll objectively try to verify or disprove.
My hypothesis is this: for regular working people who don't have access to excess capital by virtue of birth, connections, or high levels of education, life has increasingly become a living hellscape of being ripped off and exploited in every aspect of their economic life. They are more precarious and less able to control their own destiny than at any time in the modern post-war era, and they are increasingly mad about it.
First of all, it doesn't. The Silicon Valley market fundamentalist, future worshipping contingency is still very much alive and well here.
But I do agree and have noticed that the tone here is radically different than it would have been five or ten years ago. I've been around for a while here as well.
I think that's a sign of the cultural shift underneath our feet. Silicon Valley and the tech sector in general has almost no goodwill left. They've harmed too many people for that at this point.
His money is tied to his equity. The equity itself is created by typing a number into a computer - it's not taken from anybody. The equity represents the value that the company has created
Yes, this is exactly it. One of the things I've found sort of interesting and unique about the current generation of asshole industrialist sociopathic technologists is that they're not satisfied with all their money and power. They somehow have decided that people have to like them for what they've done and treat them like the best most awesome little boys.
I wasn't there at the time, so I could be wrong. But I feel like their robber baron counterparts 100 years ago knew that they were hated and had some idea of why. And that's why they spent so much money on parks and buildings and colleges and everything else. They could see option B was the masses coming across their lawn with sharp implements.
His entire essay is just based on a purposeful misreading of the opposing point. It's a straw man. And if you look at his history it's obviously intentional and part of his usual style of argument.
The actual opposing argument is that it's impossible to create a billion dollar enterprise without a group effort, and for one person to end up with a billion dollars necessarily means that they made decisions within that enterprise that resulted in a lopsided allocation of resources at the end.
Period. That's it, and it's inarguable.
Every single aspect of the system is arbitrary and is a policy decision made by society. The basic building block, the limited liability joint stock company as a legal concept with some form of independent rights and entity status is arbitrary. Every lever, every part of the system, is created by people making decisions about how society is organized.
The people he is arguing with are basically saying "we want the system structured differently because this one is producing too much concentrated wealth." That's a political choice and an eminently reasonable one.
So if it's that simple, why would he feel a need to straw man instead of just addressing the actual argument? Well because he'd lose. The reality is is most people agree with this assessment of society and want it to change.
And by the way the question of how resources get split between labor and capital is the oldest and most central political problem in human history. To adopt a condescending tone while pretending to be ignorant of stuff you learn in the first couple weeks of any real study of politics or history, betrays the deception inherent in his essay.
Of course it's arguable. You make it sound like founders perform some jedi mind-trick to take money from others. Here's what actually happens. Investors put in initial money because it's a win-win (they get an expected return, founders get starting capital). Employees join because it's a win-win (they get a salary, health, equity, other perks; founders get a workforce). Customers pay cash because it's a win-win (they get a product or service they want, the business gets money). At no point is someone being held down and forced to hand money to someone else.
Health is not a perk but an inelastic demand: a threat to withhold health is a threat of physical harm, and a negotiation in which one party's physical health is on the line is quantitatively but not qualitatively different from a negotiation held with a gun to that party's head.
I do not understand your statement, maybe you can elaborate. If you are saying there should be a public option for healthcare, I happen to agree. Then we can have the standard discussions on how the government ought to raise funds for it. If you are saying that by negotiating terms of employment, any employer is intrinsically engaged in violence, that stance is pretty out there.
If those terms include the potential for predictable harms like lack of healthcare or housing if an agreement isn't reached, then yes, I think that is indeed an engagement in violence.
Now I'm not saying that the employer is necessarily morally culpable here — I'm sure most employers would like nothing more than to not have to worry about their employees' healthcare, and certainly I doubt many people enjoy having the ability to take it away. But it doesn't change the fact that it's impossible to have a real negotiation when inelastic demands are (potentially) unmet. Someone under threat of losing health insurance or housing is negotiating under duress, contrary to the comment I replied to.
Under this principle no human has ever been able to consent to anything in the history of the world. Certainly 99.99% of humans.
This would also imply that the best thing ethically is not to give people goods in exchange for labor because the simple act of interaction with them puts their housing and food needs under your responsibility.
No human can _100%_ consent to anything (… probably: free will is tricky). Coercion is a continuum, not a binary.
I don't really think that companies (or other parties in trades) bear moral responsibility for this inherently — a company that accepted every job applicant to try to meet their inelastic demands wouldn't last long, so the company itself is also under some duress even if it might like to. Trying to assign blame for complex distributed problems isn't really that simple. Your example in particular is a trolley problem, and I (personally) don't believe that pulling the lever makes you more culpable than deliberately choosing not to pull the lever.
But regardless of your chosen ethics, my point is pragmatic — while it's not correct to say that people take jobs only because they are under duress, it's also not correct to base arguments on them acting on their own free will based on their personal preferences. UBI experiments show significant changes in employee behaviour when inelastic demands are guaranteed to be met and negotiations pertain only to elastic quantities.
This effect is very much not limited to monopolies, though it's certainly easiest to see there. There's no step change from monopoly to competitive marketplace though. If you believe it's the company's moral duty to provide e.g. healthcare then in a non-monopoly situation that culpability is divided, though not abrogated (and beware the bystander effect!). From the employee's perspective, the spectre of physical harm is a bit further off, but it will still colour negotiations.
It's especially insufficient to generalize the working of the entire system from an example of a market in which employees currently have enough power to not really have to worry about the prospect of physical harm because it would be disadvantageous to the employers to cause it. Even if we take the current state of the SaaS startup market as reliable (which it isn't) the original argument was not limited to SaaS startup employees, and in other industries (including ones that are a bit down the pyramid from the SaaS companies) things are a lot less rosy for employees.
A sole consumer of labor is a monopsony, not a monopoly (that would be a union). At any rate, the point is that there are many many employment negotiations that no reasonable person would agree to amount to duress. This is a counterexample to the idea that any negotiation of employment involves duress. I don't need to disprove the existence of any coercive employment. But SaaS companies are especially relevant since pg specializes in showing people how to become billionaires through SaaS. If earning a billion dollars implies some measure of coercion we should be able to find that in a SaaS startup.
Sorry, misread you — but you can substitute ‘monopsony’ into my comment and I think it still holds.
This is a ‘no true Scotsman’ so I don't think I can really respond to it directly. But I'll point out that my claim is not that some contracts bargaining for safety of life and limb are a form of duress but that all inherently are (to some extent). Especially when the other party's BATNA is ‘no guarantee of safety’.
That's not quite true, the police hold me down and lock me in a cell if I don't hand money to a landlord.
They don't hold me down and force me to hand money to a landlord, mind, they just lock me in a cell if I don't, so maybe it doesn't meet your standard of proof.
You would get evicted at most. Even if you're in debt, bankruptcy does not come with any criminal liability. You'd have to do something much worse to receive jail time. And I'm not really sure what this has to do with startups, is the claim that the founders are in cahoots with landlords in the Bay Area to hold employees captive?
Being homeless is illegal in many countries, including the one where I live. If I am evicted because I can't pay rent, then obviously I also can't get a hotel room, and my existence is illegal
I don't think pg would disagree that the politicians that discuss this want to allocate more resources to labor. But what he takes exception with specifically is the rhetoric used to justify this "reallocation." AOC's claim:
> “There’s a certain level of wealth and accumulation that is unearned,” she said. “You can’t earn a billion dollars. You just can’t earn that. You can get market power, you can break rules, you can abuse labor laws, you can pay people less than what they’re worth, but you can’t earn that.”
You can produce a motte-and-bailey-type argument where the "get market power" and "pay people less than their worth" are doing all the heavy lifting in that statement. But I think we can agree that she is very much tying the accrual of wealth to various kinds of villainy. That is what pg is taking on. And that matters because the common person would agree with the statement that you should be rewarded for what you create - if wealth accrual is all theft, that perception would make a much stronger argument for the reallocation of resources.
One can agree that they would rather see wealth more equitably distributed while also admitting that the current system of private property and capitalism is the most effective at broadly generating wealth.
You could say that, but you also don't have to concede it.
In fact, my argument would be that the more regulated, industrial-policy-driven economies of the recent past were better at generating wealth and improving society.
For the most part, the real conflict that we're having around these topics is about the reorganization of the economy that happened starting in the mid-1970s.
This change shifted the focus of the US economy to financial extraction and away from industrial policies, a role that we sold out to China for the benefit of our elite classes and the severe detriment of our working class.
> it's impossible to create a billion dollar enterprise without a group effort
George Lucas made a movie with a (small) group effort. But what made a billion dollars is his Star Wars universe which is almost entirely his creation.
It literally creates wealth for other people. If my toy sells $10,000 without Star Wars and $100,000 with it, did I participate in making George’s billion, or am I benefiting from it?
> means that they made decisions within that enterprise that resulted in a lopsided allocation of resources at the end.
What do you mean? Every good and service involves many people, but the degree to which they participate in its creation and risk vary. For example, a Farmer may create a more efficient way to grow food. Is the grocery store now entitled to a piece of the reward? They didn’t change anything, all of the improvement is the farmer side.
The bit about Lucas is obviously not true. The universe he envisioned does not sell itself, it was marketed, developed, painted and modeled, added to, kept fresh etc for many many years by a huge army of people. If the only Star Wars media that existed were the original film, or even the original trilogy, it would sell relatively little by now.
So if you were to assign value to the work to make a new Star Wars toy would you it’s (total value of Stat wars) * (number of people who have ever worked on Star Wars) / (number of people who worked on the toy)?
That’s absurd. Obviously they are creating incremental wealth and their particular toy didn’t make or break billions.
No, I'm saying that you can't attribute any significant percent of the value of a Star Wars toy sold today to George Lucas. If Star Wars had not continued after the 1980 films, these toys would not keep selling so much today.
The post I replied to allocated all of the monetary value of the Star Wars branding of a toy to George Lucas personally, which I think is obviously wrong.
Hmm, what about JK Rowling and LeBron James where the vast majority of their value is explicitly going to their publisher and they keep only a small percentage. Their tiny portion is a billion after everyone else takes most of it!
Harry Potter became a billion dollar business after the movies and toys and so on were created - again, it takes waayyy more people than one to actually produce this amount of money. The initial idea that Rowling herself came up with is of course a significant part of that - but still only a small part of it, in the grand scheme of things.
It's also important to note that Harry Potter making billions of dollars also prevented any other similar books or ideas from making any large profits. The entertainment industry is very much a winner takes all industry. HP didn't hugely grow the children's entertainment market, it just outcompeted other works. This is extremely important to understand, because it directly implies that a huge part of the value is simply that media execs decided to bet big on HP instead of trying out many other possible properties. The money would have happened either way, more or less the same - they just would have been distributed to one or many other authors instead, if JK Rowling hadn't hit it out of the park. People would have bought a roughly similar amount of books for their children to read, a roughly similar amount of toys, would have taken them to a roughly similar amount of movies.
JK Rowling, the proofreaders, the reviewers, the printers, the marketing, the librarians... Everyone in that list is in effect getting stolen from by the publishers, yes.
in the same way that Lebron didn't go where with his own feet, he benefited from coaches, support, doctors, nutrionists & cooks, all dedicated to putting everything into this one man. Do you think merely being a freak of nature nets you a billion ?
Right, and even if we assume Lebron accomplished his entire basketball career by himself and that his salary is 100% “earned”, his salary didn’t net him a billion dollars.
you’re only strengthening the argument that people deserve asymmetric compensation. LeBron and the NBA have a symbiotic relationship where both of them make more money because they exist. And I would guess the NBA made a lot more money than LeBron.
Are we not discussing this in the context of this parent message?
> The actual opposing argument is that it's impossible to create a billion dollar enterprise without a group effort, and for one person to end up with a billion dollars necessarily means that they made decisions within that enterprise that resulted in a lopsided allocation of resources at the end.
--
> And I would guess the NBA made a lot more money than LeBron.
And yes, in this case I believe the NBA is extracting asymmetrically, from Lebron and others.
Once again, the publisher gave her something like 5-10% of sales and kept 90% to cover those costs and she is still a billionaire!!! So is your real beef with the publisher?
> George Lucas made a movie with a (small) group effort. But what made a billion dollars is his Star Wars universe which is almost entirely his creation.
If that were actually true, how come we can't predict what the next Star Wars universe will be?
Same for pop songs etc. If it were actually about objective qualities of the creation, and not just luck, the next winners of the lottery would be apparent even before they hit the theaters.
There is null inherent quality in the Star Wars universe causing the billion dollar revenue. If George Lucas wouldn't have been there at the right spot at the right time, the dominant IP would simply have been something different.
If you have kids, you can directly observer what actually happens: The IP owners dump huge amounts of money into merch and product placements everywhere, resulting in them getting in contact with the franchise before they are out of their diapers. My kids came home from daycare roleplaying lightsaber fights without any previous contact with the franchise at our home. The trick is implanting the meme (in the original meaning of the word) into kids' brains before another meme can nest in there.
Your position is that any correct prediction or investment can be explained by luck. That sounds more unfalsifable to me - it sounds like you’re neglecting evidence, actually.
I addressed that. The movies themselves are not the source of the wealth and yes the original was created by a group so small that theoretically Star Wars wealth could have been divided evenly and they would be billionaires.
If you say the original crew did not do all the labor required to make the franchise grow in the future (obviously true), you are now arguing different people have had incremental impact on creating the wealth, which is kind of the point.
It's instructive that people like you pick people like LeBron James or J.K. Rowling to make your points.
The reason is that the conflict here is between labor and capital. And those two, at least in their primary roles, are labor, as a writer and an athlete. One of them is even a union member operating under a collective bargaining agreement.
They're just the absolute pinnacle top of anything that could possibly be put in that category.
But if I'm arguing that this is really about the division of of the spoils between labor and capital, and you have to resort to picking members of the labor class to make your argument then you have essentially conceded my point, which is that returns to labor are different than returns to capital, and returns to capital are much harder to defend. You didn't pick Bill Ackman for a reason.
> The actual opposing argument is that it's impossible to create a billion dollar enterprise without a group effort
The other thing that we're often ignoring is that it's impossible to create a billion dollar enterprise without luck. You have to be at the right place at the right time.
For the most part only capital gets to roll the dice, but even before that it's a sign of the times that we take it seriously at all when people talk about "earning" a billion dollars. We could all do with a bit more humility.
She ran the printing press and picked the camera lenses and stacked the books by the cash register and booked her own press interviews? Also who taught all the kids to read?
Why does she have to control the entire vertical process to earn a billion dollars? She sold her work and got paid a billion dollars for it. Who did she exploit? In what way were her earnings unearned?
That’s just back to my original point. Which was that every billion dollar enterprise is a collective or team effort and the only argument is about how the results get allocated.
Which is, as I pointed out, inarguable. No one is spawned alone in the woods to start their adventure independently of the society they are in.
PG says this in his post though. He says the people working for the startup whose founder he talked to are being compensated fairly and properly. To claim his post is a misreading you have to claim every billionaire wouldnt be a billionaire if resources were allocated correctly.
He takes that as a given but this is, in fact, the argument and you can't wave it away.
By doing so he's being disingenuous. The argument here is about who gets what. And the startup founder and its employees are not the only participants in the economy.
The revenue flowing in to his hypothetical startup is exogenous to the startup so you have to talk about where it's coming from, who's affected, and how that fits in with policy goals.
For an extreme but accurate thought experiment, imagine concluding your analysis of FTX by noting that their employees were "fairly and properly" paid and then moving on.
Intent isn't necessarily an element required to prove fraud. Recklessness can be sufficient. Also to the extent intent is required intent to deceive is sufficient, ie the intent to cause someone to rely on a false statement, even if there's no intent to harm because you're convinced your fraudulent scheme will ultimately lead to success.
You can characterize things however you want. But "theft" and "fraud" are extensively defined concepts in caselaw. Fraud, specifically, is legally defined quite differently than what most people think the word means in common usage and your example here does not have much relationship to it.
Well I have only seen media reports alleging theft, such as the article linked, they don't necessarily have to conform to legal definitions. A cynical person might suggest that perhaps media coverage deliberately chooses between colloquial, legal, and scientific definitions at will depending on the narrative they would like to create.
Was there ever a charge of theft in the legal sense filed in court?
Amazing "By 1825, the majority of Cherokees could read and write in their newly developed orthography.[5]". It even has a reference so it must be true.
Around the same time, Christian missionaries introduced writing (using an adapted Latin alphabet) to Hawai`i. Within ten years nearly the entire population (I would guess with the exception of older people) was literate. Mark Twain remarked on Hawai`ian literacy a few decades later.
> if they are avoiding doing awful things in the name of money, then they are leaving something on the table
That doesn't stand as a reason at all. I think the big contrast isn't as you described. It's more about short-term versus long-term or conflict of interest between principals and shareholders.
But to be specific, Wells Fargo was mentioned, and their downfall was very much driven by doing awful things in the name of money, specifically.
There is a whole table of examples like the one you mentioned in the book. This has been going on a long time: companies being destroyed, all in the name of profit.
> Clickable links sent in email are more secure than passwords so I'll stop supporting passwords and instead rely on email delivery of a link for all logins
God, I fucking hate that.
I have a fucking password manager, I have various machines and things open. Just let me fucking log in.
If anyone is reading this who is in charge of the internet please stop doing this.
I seem to spend half my life logging into thing's, confirming 2fa,confirming biometric data. Then when I go back to the first thing it's timed out and I have to sign in again.
It is with much hesitation that I write this, because I just implemented such a flow.
My reasoning was this: my customers keep forgetting their password and somehow that becomes a trigger to contact me. No passwords, no problem.
I tried convincing them to use password managers but that was pointless.
But I see the pain and frustration so I will add passwords. And I quite liked the passkey idea, have to see how that works. Not that my customers would ever use it, but I would. It literally never occured to me.
To be clear, no shade on actual devs faced with actual problems. My ire is reserved exclusively for the "we must do this because it is on the checklist, no I don't understand what a subnet is" people.
A lot of those same people seemed perfectly capable of insisting on 60 day password rotation back when they could use nist guidance as an authority to appeal to (for about five years after the recommendation changed too).
Specifically the revocation of such guidance. If the field gave even the slightest deference to empiricism we wouldn't be changing our password every 180 days, but here we are.
So agreed. It’s fucking crazy. Password manager is so much easier and more secure. If you do this dumb email or SMS OTP flow, at LEAST support passkeys for my password manager!
It’s wild that they’re like “it’s more secure to not have a password” and then choose two unencrypted delivery mechanisms for the very short OTP.
Sure, people who reuse passwords are not secure. And fair, I guess it’s a tragedy of the commons. But at least continue supporting it and make it dead simple for password managers if you actually care bout security
I thought the same for a long time but now i don't know. If your computer is compromised, they can exfiltrate your password, but with a hardware key they can't, so i think that's legitimately more secure than password+otp. It still needs a pin though to protect against device theft.
I bring this up because there's been a ton of compromised developer packages recently and windows itself is being attacked so even if you're pretty good about protecting yourself, you still might get screwed.
That doesn't address anything. If your device is compromised they do not need your hardware key because they can just read all mails on device or steal login/session cookies for accounts and bypass authentication.
Passkey is still inferior to U2F + password anyways.
I don't think it should be the sites' responsibility to guess whether the browser session is the have device will receive an SMS message... The fact that it is SMS is already bad anyway.
Time-code apps or passkeys are a different story.
1. You should be able to make backups.
2. There's nothing to intercept in plaintext.
3. The all can (unlike SMS features) be locked down by default and require a second layer of unlocking, so that they usually aren't accessible to someone who grabs your phone out of your hand.
It absolutely should be the Bank's concern when this is how 99% of their customers will use it. Some even have deliberate integration between the baking and 2FA apps.
I can assure you, with the utmost in direct observation, that they are extraordinarily obsessed with money. It is, in fact, the defining characteristic of their entire existence, literally by definition.
Any argument to the contrary is profoundly hilarious. Imagine if you came across someone that had over one billion model trains in his basement who was claiming that he wasn't super interested in model trains.
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