331–340 of 461 posts
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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.
"Startups either go Facebook or go bust, they're not created to stay stable at small scale." I started rsync.net with the intention of staying stable at small scale. It's worked out so far.
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So, someone who needs a car to get to work at their new job but has no existing wealth can afford the car equally with or without financing, just based on spending and saving habits???
Cars specifically excluded by the poster to whom I replied. But the sibling comment to yours made exactly the same point about housing. Should I have highlighted the quote from the grandparent post better?
So, I get your overall point.
The other thing to recognize is that being poor is MORE EXPENSIVE than being rich. This fundamental fact is often missed by richer (or just middle-class) folks who think that poor people could do better by saving and being frugal etc. Well, if you have no liquid cash at all, you can't even take advantage of quantity discounts or other opportunities, but you still need to eat and have clothes. A decent amount of wealthier people in our system get wealthy via taking advantage of the desperation of poor people, and until that changes, some amount of criticizing the personal financial decisions of poor folks is just victim-blaming.
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The last paragraph was the whole point: > I worry that if we don't acknowledge this, we're headed for trouble. If we think 20th century cohesion disappeared because of few policy tweaks, we'll be deluded into thinking we can get it back (minus the bad parts, somehow) with a few countertweaks. And then we'll waste our time trying to eliminate fragmentation, when we'd be better off thinking about how to mitigate its co…
> He's saying income inequality is a feature of technology allowing people to be paid their market value and that you can't 'fix' that. The thing that I worry about is whether this feature is destroying the conditions that allowed it to become a feature in the first place. He mentioned the example of Apple and IBM, which I see as illustrative in another way. Would personal computing devices have become popular in a h…
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> a monopsonist facing a price floor doesn’t necessarily buy less, just as a monopolist facing a price ceiling doesn’t necessarily sell less and may sell more. The theory is that the buyers of labor in these cases will simply buy alternatives - specifically low-labor alternatives, like automation. Think of automated checkout stands at retail stores, but applied to fast food. Time was, fuel filling stations all had at…
This doesn't really affect your point, but gas station attendants aren't completely gone - in New Jersey, it's illegal for a motorist to pump their own gas. The purpose, of course, is to keep those minimum-wage jobs around.
Both states are considering legislation allowing self serve pumps.
If people enjoy reading history like this, I highly recommend Jeffrey Frieden's "Global Capitalism: It's Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century." Overall, I think a dimension perhaps lacking in PG's otherwise fantastic writeup is that this 'fragmentation' opens up a space of freedom. I mean, our society basically interpolates individuals (younger generations at least) as existential subjects - no set path on what we…
Whatever your reason, it is still difficult to deny (IMHO) that more than ever today we have the freedom to set our own path, in a way we never have before.
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> A few people making rules can't stop that kind of force Can you elaborate please on what kind of force at work? Market forces? Also, do you have any idea why he's bringing up the subject of "social cohesion" repeatedly throughout the piece? Is social cohesion a hot button issue in the US now that warrants more attention from the general public? Because I believe that as long as the country is not at war with or in…
> the availability of capital or lack thereof is the main catalyst in this equation not technology. You mean if you can't afford a computer and an AWS account you can't get started? Sure, maybe not, but it's a far cry from the capital you needed in the 1960s to get started. I bet a lot of the readers of this forum know people personally that have made a million dollars or more with their laptop (to a first order appr…
A very fascinating article that I have truly enjoyed reading minus the last 10 or so paragraphs where Paul expressed it unequivocally that he's a status-quo warrior and that nothing can be done to remedy the problem of the ever widening gap of income inequality in the global economy and more specifically in the US and that it's a "natural" product of the state of affairs in our world. A classical example of « the nat…
It's exactly the opposite, and even acknowledged in the article: on an international scale, the world is getting more equal, not less.
I wonder if the same is true of coordinating efforts in a centrally planned economy - would computers be the same kind of fundamental change there?
A very fascinating article that I have truly enjoyed reading minus the last 10 or so paragraphs where Paul expressed it unequivocally that he's a status-quo warrior and that nothing can be done to remedy the problem of the ever widening gap of income inequality in the global economy and more specifically in the US and that it's a "natural" product of the state of affairs in our world. A classical example of « the nat…
> No leftie is arguing or longing for any of these policies. This is not correct. If you read "Capital in the Twenty-First Century", the book most lefties are pushing nowadays, you'll see there is a chapter with recommended solutions. The recommended solutions are things like government control of CEO salaries, confiscatory taxes on the rich (e.g. not taxes to pay for something, taxes to specifically change their sta…