Most of these companies are obviously a scam in one way or another. It just depends on your definition of what a scam is. Is it a scam to insert a middle-man to profit off a transaction that already occurs, or is it a brilliant hack? Is it a scam to use huge amounts of veture funding to undercut prices in an existing market to grab market share and claim "disruption?" These are called business models, but some of us call them scams. They seem particularly scammy when they never ultimately turn a profit and begin to look suspiciously pyramid shaped.
This is the moment in an online discussion where we all lose 50 IQ points, so thanks for that.
"Scam" has a well understood meaning in modern legal and economic systems, and that's obviously what I'm addressing, not some other ideologically-charged alternative definition that you're now invoking as a debating move that amounts to little more than trolling.
(As for middlemen - for as long as commerce has existed, middlemen have been derided for inserting themselves into transactions that were already happening, by people blithely handwaving away the fact that those transactions were not, in fact, already happening.)
Your insinuation was that YC trains the founders it invests in to deliberately build long-term money-losing companies, which is demonstrably false and also highly implausible.
Philosophical discussions about the deeper nature of things are also of great interest to me, but not like this.
