The Refragmentation • Hacker News Board

Re: The Refragmentation

#401

Post by smileysteve » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 5:50 PM UTC

MaysonL wrote: post #290

edanm wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But wait, some people start a pizza place or a grocery store or something similar. Those kinds of businesses are definitely new businesses, and people who start these kinds of businesses is what was traditionally meant by the word "entrepreneur". But startups are qualitatively different - they are usually started with the express (and usually only ) purpose of growing very large, very fast. Call them startups or not,…

VC-funded companies, almost 100%.

I was thinking exactly this. How many articles are we reading about extreme VC preferred stock, raising such high valuations that the only option is to go public after the first months. Raising so much money on terms that you require a big exit.

Re: The Refragmentation

#402

Post by jcalvinowens » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 5:52 PM UTC

mhaymo wrote: post #396

zanny wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor is relative. We are talking about the difference between having a safety net at your parents house where they have a combined income of 300k and might have a cleaning maid every weekend versus a billionaire CEO with penthouses in four cities and his own airplane. One is middle class, the other is extremely rich.

So the focus on "inequality" is a focus on large wealth at the expense of thinking about poverty, to the degree that you call 6-figure earners "people at the bottom". I'm still not convinced that a "supermajority" of innovation does not involve the very rich. Much innovation today comes from companies like Google, Apple, SpaceX, lead by very wealthy leaders. Even if you were right, the point remains that limiting the…

> Even if you were right, the point remains that limiting the upside of risk-taking also reduces the incentives for middle-class people to innovate.

No, it doesn't: relative to middle-class net worth, hitting it big makes you orders of magnitude richer. Even if you taxed that level of wealth at 95%, it would still be absurdly rich compared to the mean.

Re: The Refragmentation

#403

Post by 13thLetter » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 5:57 PM UTC

drewm1980 wrote: post #355

13thLetter wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"2) get rid of the absurd legal doctrine established by the Citizens United decision that money=speech and hence the First Amendment applies to bribery." Unfortunately it's not that simple. The immediate question at hand in Citizens United was about a group of private citizens being prevented from releasing a movie criticizing a Presidential candidate during an election. A movie costs money to produce and requires a…

I would decide that NO corporate legal structures are making "legitimate" political speech. I am 100% comfortable with political discourse taking the form of (volunteer) blog posts, etc... rather than major motion pictures (even if "crowd" funded). Money is not speech. Speech is Speech!

A consistent point of view, but you'll have to apply it to newspapers, book publishers, and television too, just for starters. Money in politics is going to migrate towards any method of advertising that it isn't completely banned from.

I'm not convinced that content-based restrictions can be easily applied, either, even putting aside one's confidence in the regulators. To take the above example of a documentary attacking Reagan, it would be easy for it to have the subtext of "and don't vote for Mitt Romney this year, he's just like that Reagan jerk."

Re: The Refragmentation

#404

Post by bespoke_engnr » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 5:57 PM UTC

landryraccoon wrote: post #240

gotchange wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I love HN as much as the next person but suggesting that the people who hang out here are somehow representative of anything except for the most lucky, wealthy, and privileged members of our society seems a bit strange.

The point you're making about tech startup costs is true, of course, although it looks like statistically speaking the chances of hitting it big are only slightly better than 'will become a famous singer' or 'will play for the NBA.'

But even if we assume that an average human with a laptop and AWS can now make it big, it seems like in the meantime so much of the other things that working-class people had going for them in the 1960s -- being able to support a family on construction wages, for example -- are gone.

Re: The Refragmentation

#405

Post by smileysteve » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 6:10 PM UTC

hueving wrote: post #227

basicplus2 wrote: post #181

Imagine a society of four people, one grows rice for four, one grows chickens for four one grows vegetables for four, one builds and maintains houses for four there is no profit and there is equality. If one person is profiting... or in our world a person is profiting more than the others it is inequality in action. Progressive tax rates are the simplest solution. The thinking that one persons work is more important…

That's ridiculous because it eliminates all incentives to invest time in training. Why would anyone risk harm and spend years training to be an expert welder when he/she will get the same results as some person that throws some seeds in the ground to grow food for 4 people? The fact is that some people's work is more important than others. That's why society in general is willing to pay more. The kid that rips my tic…

> Why would anyone risk harm and spend years training to be an expert welder when he/she will get the same results as some person that throws some seeds in the ground to grow food for 4 people?

Because it's not the same results, it's progressive results.

The inefficient farmer gets 1 result * X tax rate The efficient welder gets (1 result * X tax rate) + (Y result * X+Z tax rate)

As long as the tax rate < 100%, the higher efficiency is not only part of the return, it's also encouraged to have a better ROI.

Re: The Refragmentation

#406

Post by smileysteve » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 6:20 PM UTC

dkural wrote: post #349

justinhj wrote: post #344

Consider one ycombinator company,Uber. Do they generate wealth? From the point of view of a NYC taxi driver they are directly taking both the customers and the value of the drivers medallions. In return,uber drivers work giving 1/3 of their earnings to a company because that company built the software and lobbied the governments (presumably eventually) to allow this new form of public transport. It doesn't seem any d…

Most drivers prefer Uber. Uber takes value away from the middlemen, takes a smaller share of the middleman cut, and redistributes the remaining value to the driver and the passenger. Hence its popularity. Most of the profit in the old system accrues to the taxicab company + medallion holder. Uber does hurt these folks, by giving more of the pie to the driver, who can now drive without owning a medallion & is not hurt…

> Most drivers prefer Uber. Uber takes value away from the middlemen, takes a smaller share of the middleman cut, and redistributes the remaining value to the driver and the passenger. Hence its popularity.

This is a primary result of the "fragmentation" caused by the corruption of the medallion and taxi corporations. If drivers had continued (in some cases) to be direct owners of the medallions or if Taxi corporations had not directed many of the profits to the top, then the answer of driver and consumer choice would be less known.

More drivers likely prefer Lyft if the market of riders exists (Lyft takes a lower cut and is less harsh), and that eventually lower cost (even free / open source) alternatives are taking over (Spain).

Re: The Refragmentation

#407

Post by Wissmania » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 6:20 PM UTC

I don't see how someone can credibly argue that raising income tax rates discourages innovation. As if Zuck or Gates wouldn't have started their companies if they only would have made $25 billion instead of $50 billion.

He even argues in earlier writing that most of the innovation comes from genuine passion for solving a problem, rather than profit motive.

People who have worked a lot to increase their wealth understandably don't want a portion of it taken away, even if it probably won't make them less happy, or motivate people less in the future.

Re: The Refragmentation

#408

Post by ignasl » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 6:27 PM UTC

sawwit wrote: post #397

ignasl wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh great lets get back into the trees. Then we will be very advanced society.

This is not what OP is saying.

This is exactly what he was saying. I just put it this way to show how absurd his idea is if we follow through with it till the end.

Re: The Refragmentation

#409

Post by msandford » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 6:42 PM UTC

PavlovsCat wrote: post #306

msandford wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A full scale war today, excluding skirmishes, between two large conventional armies would be nuclear. It would be over very fast. The problem with this line of thinking is you assume that the enemy doesn't care if there's a world left for them to have greater power/influence/wealth/whatever in. Nobody really wins a nuclear war, some people just lose a little less.

> some people just lose a little less. ..that's how the world works already. Nobody needs a second house or car or whatever as much as some other people need food, clothes, medicine and/or shelter. Does this make the world a shitty place? IMHO yes, and the people who "win" don't really win, not in my books, because they are damaged in wholly other ways I'm not jealous of at all. But here we are, and I think you're im…

If the planet is no longer capable of sustaining life after the nuclear war is over -- and I would argue that once you launch a couple of missiles you might as well launch them all, just to be safe -- then yes nobody wins. Your country/continent might die out more slowly than the other ones, but nuclear winter will kill everyone.

Now if you have 1000 years of rations saved up sure you might win. You might be the only person left on earth. But is that winning? Maybe somebody thinks so, I guess.

Re: The Refragmentation

#410

Post by three14 » Sun, Jan 03, 2016, 6:48 PM UTC

zanny wrote: post #385

three14 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pressure, yes, but I want numbers - what percentage of jobs have disappeared over, say, the past 20 years, and could increased demand realistically replace those jobs in other sectors? You can't simply say "manual labor is over, because... singularity." There's no singularity yet. Until then, you need data before you can really extrapolate from current trends. The easiest things to automate are already automated, and…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/23/middle-class-jobs-m... http://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-bots-are-taking-aw... http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/smart-machines-job-... Most relevantly to this direct topic: http://fortune.com/2015/02/25/5-jobs-that-robots-already-are... Like I said, there are demonstrable mechanisms, and in-lab and even in-market examples of how these technologies are going to…

None of this really answers the question. Of course technology eliminates jobs. This has been happening since before Ford was founded and before all those automotive jobs were originally created. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite for instance. The question isn't whether specific jobs are being destroyed, but rather whether all unskilled jobs are being destroyed, and none of those links even begin to give any data on the subject.