Comment by seu a day ago
Is this seriously trying to portray OpenAI/Altman or Nvidia/Huang as unlikely everyday dudes who reluctantly take up a challenge and rise to become heroes? I never stop being amazed at how people love to present rich, well connected, people as underdogs and turn them into heroes.
I grew up around that area, and this story has serious stench of PR crafted mythical origin story. Oneida Baptist Institute is a prestigious private school, not one of those child abuse mills, we've had a governor and a state rep attend that school.
Child labor is super common around these parts, especially on family farms. I grew up working on my family's tobacco farm just like pretty much everyone else. My uncle was even nice enough one summer to give me $20 a week for weeding and bug removal from a 5 acre farm. I thought it was so much money. I remember saving up to buy those bargain bin "300 Games" type CDs at Walmart.
I wasn't attempting to create that conflation in my post, if you read that, I wasn't clear enough.
I personally think it's fine for children to work on their family's business as long as it doesn't impact their schooling or normal childhood activities. It is a fine line to walk, I don't believe I missed out on anything like after school activities, but that was largely because there aren't too many of those opportunities deep in the mountains in Kentucky. I say it's a fine line, because it's easy to see a scenario where children are put to work in, say a family restaurant, and prevented from doing after school activities like sports or clubs, and miss out on part of the well rounding of an education.
I certainly don't support children working for third parties that then profit off of their labor. In those cases, there is no way to align the incentives to protect the child.
Labor in the sense that it's abuse is exploitative. It's extractive. Child labor seeks to use the children for the profit of the adults running the operation. There's certainly _work_ that children can grow from doing. There's certainly work that looks like labor that children grow from doing. They just actually have to grow from doing it, and that must be the motivation. If you start making money off of children, then your care for the limits of the "healthy dose" starts diminishing real fast.
Yep this, children are the most vulnerable class. If the capitalist system had the power it had in the past, we'd just throw them into factories at age 6 or 7 again and damn them to the terrible life of a factory worker with no rights so some adult can have slightly more.
Interestingly enough, the other Nvidia co-founder (Curtis Priem) ended up cashing out decades ago and has been donating pretty much all of his wealth to his (and my) alma mater, RPI. Also an interesting story, see this from ~2y ago: https://www.forbes.com/sites/phoebeliu/2023/11/26/this-nvidi...
Unfortunately we do like rich people. We do hold them up as hero's. We fantasize about being rich. Watch shows about their lives, etc...
Bruce Wayne was rich. Those fancy suits and cars aren't cheap.
Tony Stark was rich. Fancy robot tech isn't cheap.
It takes money to actually do anything. Super Hero stories about rich people. We idolize making a difference with the money.
If by "we" you mean US popular culture, yes. It's not universal, and definitely varies by country.
In the UK we don't tend to idolise the rich so much. Not to say it doesn't happen, but in popular culture positive depictions tend to be limited to period portrayals of idealised aristocracy (and even then it's rarely shown as heroic), with contemporary wealth usually treated as a dubious virtue.
Yes. Good point. This is a pretty US specific cultural phenomenon.
Probably rooted in the 'self made man', 'rugged individualism'. Go West to make your fortune. We forget the US is pretty young, and still has a lot of culture based on colonizing the west, taming the wilderness to find your riches.
If you read about Huang's childhood it's quite surprising:
> At age nine, Jensen, despite not being able to speak English, was sent by his parents to live in the United States.[15] He and his older brother moved in 1973 to live with an uncle in Tacoma, Washington, escaping widespread social unrest in Thailand.[16] Both Huang's aunt and uncle were recent immigrants to Washington state; they accidentally enrolled him and his brother in the Oneida Baptist Institute, a religious reform academy in Kentucky for troubled youth,[16] mistakenly believing it to be a prestigious boarding school.[17] In order to afford the academy's tuition, Jensen's parents sold nearly all their possessions.[18]
> When he was 10 years old, Huang lived with his older brother in the Oneida boys' dormitory.[17] Each student was expected to work every day, and his brother was assigned to perform manual labor on a nearby tobacco farm.[18] Because he was too young to attend classes at the reform academy, Huang was educated at a separate public school—the Oneida Elementary school in Oneida, Kentucky—arriving as "an undersized Asian immigrant with long hair and heavily accented English"[17] and was frequently bullied and beaten.[19] In Oneida, Huang cleaned toilets every day, learned to play table-tennis,[b] joined the swimming team,[21] and appeared in Sports Illustrated at age 14.[22] He taught his illiterate roommate, a "17-year-old covered in tattoos and knife scars,"[22] how to read in exchange for being taught how to bench press.[17] In 2002, Huang recalled that he remembered his life in Kentucky "more vividly than just about any other".[22]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jensen_Huang