Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Refragmentation

paulgraham.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 461 posts

Re: The Refragmentation

#61

Post by 13of40 »

bhuga wrote: post #43

Interesting piece. It will take some time to digest. I wonder about the arrow of causation for conformity back in the 40's. This essay describes WWII as a spark of a generation of conformity (preceded by the New Deal for some). But it's really hard to imagine modern society signing on to a world war. What's to stop parents afraid of vaccinations from taking their draft-age children to New Zealand? Was there something…

> What's to stop parents afraid of vaccinations from taking their draft-age children to New Zealand?

This reminds me of something a friend of mine told me over Christmas: Her 65-year-old uncle is not currently allowed to travel abroad from Ukraine because 25 years ago he was an Army officer and anyone with military experience is being held in reserve. So the answer to your question is simply "police at the borders".

Re: The Refragmentation

#62

Post by tlogan »

> A lot of the change I've seen is fragmentation. US politics is much more polarized

> than it used to be.

I really do not want to be jerk here but this is 'white guy point of view'. The US politics is more polarized than it used to be because black, latinos, women, gays, socialists, etc. have some voice in politics now. Before they had absolutely no voice or very little.

Re: The Refragmentation

#63

Post by wutbrodo »

beagle3 wrote: post #49
harryh wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes an obligation on Wal-Mart's part to pay people according to their need. In a market economy, people are paid according to their ability.

But welfare payments are paid according to need. My understanding on Sanders' statement is that it could be paraphrased: "If walmart employes didn't get state welfare, waltons wouldn't be as rich, because they would have to pay more (employees who can't afford food and shelter can't work for you) ... ergo, walmart employees are, at the moment, practically, a conduit of welfare from the state to the waltons". (That is…

> ergo, walmart employees are, at the moment, practically, a conduit of welfare from the state to the waltons

This doesn't make any sense (though you have paraphrased Sanders accurately). While technically true for some definition of "conduit of welfare", the same is true of almost everybody in society. Welfare recipients are integrated into the economy enough that "if X didn't get welfare, person Y wouldn't be as rich" is true for many, many, many values of Y (neighborhood stores in poor areas, people benefiting from reduced crime ("stealing bread to feed your family" used to be more than a trope), etc). To give an example in microcosm: if you buy a used car on Craigslist from someone, the fact that the seller is a welfare recipient doesn't mean that you're a beneficiary of welfare because you're not paying him enough to live off of.

To the extent that society is responsible for helping the poor (FTR, I personally believe in this responsibility), it makes absolutely no sense to claim that employers (as opposed to the welfare system) are responsible for filling the gap between "market value of a person's labor" and "how much income he needs to reasonably survive".

This particular claim of Sanders is absolutely idiotic: people are blindly pattern-matching it to support for the poor when in reality he's arguing for shifting the burden of subsidies from all of society to arbitrary consumers/business owners/employees affected by artificial wage floors.

Re: The Refragmentation

#64

Post by frik »

13of40 wrote: post #58
golergka wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to be just small businesseses, not startups. Startups either go Facebook or go bust, they're not created to stay stable at small scale.

Seems like it might be a kind of survivorship bias. A hundred years from now, will people look at our era as one with a rich ecosystem of startups, or as one dominated by a half-dozen Facebooks and Twitters?

How many startups from 1995-2001 are still around that took seed-money and a few rounds and then stagnated (newer took off) since 2001? How many small companies (self funded) survived from the same timeframe? Startups have usually a goal IPO or get bought or the disolve themself after some time - right?

Re: The Refragmentation

#66

Post by visakanv »

paulpauper wrote: post #48

Small observation: why title the file re.html? Why not just spell fragmentation? Is there a reason to do it this way? Why .html? Doesn't that make it hard to update all the pages at once such as menus and footers? The design is very minimalist, but it's effective. We're definitely in a winner-take-all economy, whether it's real estate, stocks, the dominance of companies like Google, amazon, and amazon, or web 2.0 val…

PG's urls are simple and memorable enough that you can type them into a text message. I direct people to paulgraham.com/wealth.html, paulgraham.com/love.html, paulgraham.com/hs.html and paulgraham.com/essay.html all the time, from memory. It's useful!

Re: The Refragmentation

#67

Post by bhauer »

golergka wrote: post #36
rsync wrote: post #3

"Obviously the spread of computing power was a precondition for the rise of startups." If you live in San Francisco (or are visiting) you can visit the USS Pampanito - a retired WWII submarine.[1] One thing I think you will notice is the manufacturers plaques attached to every little piece of equipment in the submarine ... every one of them the plaque of some tiny little supplier that you have never heard of . Some l…

That seems to be just small businesseses, not startups. Startups either go Facebook or go bust, they're not created to stay stable at small scale.

Facebook or bust. If this is the definition that we're expected to accept, I will say that as a consumer and human being, I prefer interacting with and being a part of small businesses more than startups.

It would seem this definition paints a startup as a proto-bigcorp. If the prevalence of big corporations is not a cycle we want to repeat, would we not favor businesses that do not intend to become big corporations?

Re: The Refragmentation

#68

Post by visakanv »

dreamdu5t wrote: post #22

Unlike Paul's other essays, this one did not offer me any insight. WWII bringing the country together, America becoming less culturally conformative since WWII, etc... these are obvious trends that most everyone is aware of, and which people talk about quite often.

What I thought was useful/interesting was the idea that it doesn't make sense to try and fight the fragmentation, and that it makes sense instead to focus on how to live well with it.

Re: The Refragmentation

#69

Post by frik »

paulpauper wrote: post #48

Small observation: why title the file re.html? Why not just spell fragmentation? Is there a reason to do it this way? Why .html? Doesn't that make it hard to update all the pages at once such as menus and footers? The design is very minimalist, but it's effective. We're definitely in a winner-take-all economy, whether it's real estate, stocks, the dominance of companies like Google, amazon, and amazon, or web 2.0 val…

He probably still uses the ViaWeb tech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viaweb and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arc_(programming_language) (HN tech)

Re: The Refragmentation

#70

Post by wpietri »

golergka wrote: post #36
rsync wrote: post #3

"Obviously the spread of computing power was a precondition for the rise of startups." If you live in San Francisco (or are visiting) you can visit the USS Pampanito - a retired WWII submarine.[1] One thing I think you will notice is the manufacturers plaques attached to every little piece of equipment in the submarine ... every one of them the plaque of some tiny little supplier that you have never heard of . Some l…

That seems to be just small businesseses, not startups. Startups either go Facebook or go bust, they're not created to stay stable at small scale.

I strongly disagree. As an entrepreneur and a mentor, to me a startup is just a new business that is pioneering something new.

Most new businesses are replicating an existing business model. E.g., if you open a new corner store, it's probably going to end up being like every other corner store. If you're starting a games company, you're probably going to end up like a bunch of other games companies.

Startups, on the other hand, are tackling something deeply innovative. That means early on you have to optimize for learning: understanding customers, iterating on product, seeking product-market fit. It's a very different set of behaviors for the entrepreneurs than the normal new business.

I think you're thinking of venture-backed startups, which require a large enough amount of high-risk capital that nobody will fund them unless they expect to be worth $100m+. But there are plenty of smaller startups that are self-funded or bootstrapped. They can be perfectly stable at small scale, although many of them do choose to grow substantially.

Post reply on HN