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

Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

blog.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 406 posts

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#171

Post by megalodon »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #166
RangerScience wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Monetary rewards are far from the only rewards. Ability to effect change is a broader version of that reward: Elon Musk doesn't have as much money as Zuckerburg, but there's an argument to made that he's wealthier, since he's able to enact more/different change in the world. (Of course, Facebook has had such a ridiculously large effect on the world that argument is probably hard to win , but it illustrates what I'm t…

The way Elon was able to get into a position to affect the world was by acquiring a pile of money. It was a necessary first step. If you imagine a scenario where society enforces a cap on how rich someone is allowed to get, it's possible that Musk might not have passed the threshold of money needed to get into his current position. More broadly, when a society won't let people become as rich as the market will let th…

It's also possible that the threshold for innovation would be lower because of the cap.

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#172

Post by eevilspock »

eevilspock wrote: post #112
rjkaplan wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends on how you define progress. Just to play devil's advocate: what if you define progress as "that stuff" that will increase the general well-being of the greatest number of people over the next 20 years? With that definition, does technology-powered automation still count as progress?

It would count as progress if the automated means of production were owned by the labor that is put out of work. Oh wait, that sounds like communism, and we could never ever have a reasonable discussion about that amongst a group of people who thrive off of a system that is the opposite.

RangerScience, many people, myself included, have. And guess what? We are down-voted. And then our future posts are automatically pro-actively ranked lower (A penalty has been attached to my account. See my history. Do I deserve that?). Politics is discouraged and even banned[1]. HN prides itself as being "a place for civil discussion", but it achieves that through effective suppression of dissent and criticism of SV culture. It's worked. I rarely comment here anymore.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/05/hackernews-calls-for-polit...

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#173

Post by ScottBurson »

protomyth wrote: post #36
PaulHoule wrote: post #4

If you're concerned about jobs and democracy, open an office in a swing state. The way the us electoral system is organized, every young educated person who moves from the heartland to California is a vote for Trump. Alternately find some way to get uneducated heartlanders to move to Fresno or something. Also it would help if you show just the smallest amount of empathy people in the U.S. who don't live in one of two…

"uneducated heartlanders"?

I'm going to pass along something my wife told me about, that happened when she was living in Idaho with her first husband. It was seriously suggested by some of the locals that she should undergo an exorcism. The evil spirit allegedly possessing her, that was to be the target of this procedure: her university education.

There are lot of people in rural areas in the US who not only do not have a lot of education but who have an active antipathy to it.

One shouldn't let this observation degenerate into a stereotype, but I don't think one should dismiss it either.

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#174

Post by zxcvvcxz »

baursak wrote: post #46

Democracy can be improved by having democracy in the workplace. Modern corporations are run like totalitarian, authoritarian regimes with top-down orders being barked down. If you disobey, you're out. People in Western democracies are no longer putting up with non-democratic control of their political institutions, but are completely oblivious to non-democratic control of their economic institutions and are perfectly…

> Modern corporations are run like totalitarian, authoritarian regimes with top-down orders being barked down. If you disobey, you're out. People in Western democracies are no longer putting up with non-democratic control of their political institutions, but are completely oblivious to non-democratic control of their economic institutions and are perfectly willing to take orders where and when it matters most -- every day, 9 to 5.

This sounds strikingly socialist.

As a small business owner, the one who took the risk to start it, invested my own savings, and put things together so I could coordinate selling products with paying employees, you're damn right it's my regime. If I didn't think it would be mine, I never would have started it. The future rewards would be non-existent, relevant to being a cog somewhere else. And my customers would never get the added value of what I make from the business I never would have started.

Instead of having increased ownership, autonomy, and earnings potential, I have to negotiate and play politics with other people who I know aren't as intrinsically motivated as myself? Forget it, that's entirely unrealistic. Think about what you're saying - this is not how value, wealth, and prosperity is created. Nobody is going to vote me out of being CEO, because if that were possible I wouldn't have put in the tough work (and created the value) that goes along with being a CEO.

And the capitalist system works fine, because if these employees think I'm doing a shit job, they do have a vote: leave and start their own company. The parts that don't work are actually the more socialist parts of the system, such as bailouts for big behemoth, and regulatory barriers to starting competitors.

Sorry pal, but surface-level idealism doesn't square with real-life incentives and rewards. What I'm in favor for is reducing regulations and other burdens so that you or any employees in general have the option of starting their own companies and competing with me. That's a much better way for them to "take" the value of my shares, rather than just voting it to themselves with no work done.

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#175

Post by Kluny »

DougN7 wrote: post #167
Kluny wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can start moving toward an education system that works once we agree on some core values. Someone else said that the goal of education is to produce factory workers. I disagree. I think the goal of education is to allow one teacher to effectively babysit up to 30 children at once. With both parents working, it simply isn't possible for them to give kids the attention they need to keep them healty and sane, let alo…

I've rewritten my comment three times so far ... My wife and I are fortunate enough that she can be a stay at home mom. I grew up the same way. Were middle class, though increasingly probably slightly mid to upper these days. We don't need the babysitter, and want our kids to be educated, so that is the focus. We help them with homework, etc. We're lucky. So from my perspective, having both parents working is the roo…

I agree. And some men want to be stay at home dads, and sometimes both parents want to work, and sometimes there's a single parent who's falling apart trying to do everything. I wish we could agree that all those choices are valid, and allow some social safety nets that make it possible.

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#177

Post by anigbrowl »

adamnemecek wrote: post #50
tptacek wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's been a YC RFS for Education for a long time; it's #7 on the list. YC has had some success in the space with companies like Clever, and for awhile had a sister-program dedicated solely to K-12 startups.

While nice, neither of these strikes me as truly disruptive. The downside is that to achieve the best educational environment, you'd have to open a school which doesn't scale nicely unless you plug into existing "world APIs". I guess you could start by opening a co-working space with a supervising adult (not teacher, this adult will be there to ensure that the kids aren't killing each other). There would be teachers…

For sure, but the point is that YC is welcoming to educational disruption even if the submissions so far haven't been very impactful.

I think that fundamentally the main objection to this system is that some people learn better in a classroom setting, to which I reply: 21st century education needs to make a transition to turn graduates into self-learners. This can only be achieved with a system that fosters self-learning from very early on.

I grew up in a very traditional system that would remind most Americans of the 1950s, and it hasn't impacted my self-learning ability at all. I'm fortunate in that my parents liked books and I was able to read by age 3 and as long as I can remember I had firm opinions about what I wanted to read. I'm not altogether convinced by your vision of students as intellectual tabulae rasa that can be variously configured as drones, autodidacts, or innovators.

A student's home and socioeconomic life can have as much or more impact on their intellectual development as the kind of school they attend, and the idea that perfecting education will automatically nullify other factors is a rock on which many would-be reformers have come to grief.

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#178

Post by koolba »

maxxxxx wrote: post #114
ryanworl wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technology provides massive amounts of consumer surplus and deflation. What if we need less money and lower wages are actually fine? Edit: Do the people down-voting this actually think technology doesn't provide consumer surplus and deflation? Or do you have a problem with my question?

That's easy to say for someone with a good income. For a lot of people wages go down while cost of living goes up.

> That's easy to say for someone with a good income. For a lot of people wages go down while cost of living goes up.

Bullshit. Technology brings down the cost of living by making the supply side more efficient. What goes up is the cost of the way you'd like to live as you have more options to choose from.

Obviously there's disruptions along the way (ex: automobiles lessen demand for horse breeders) but when capitalism closes a door it opens a window (ex: mechanics).

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#179

Post by dandare »

I have a very specific idea on how to improve democracy. Make all public spending easy to search. Let me elaborate: Via direct and indirect taxes democratic governments take and redistribute between 30% and 50% of our income[1]. Yet we usually have no idea how exactly is it the money spent. This has two effects:

1) many disenfranchised people think state spending is somehow secret therefore "all politicians steel" and "the system is evil". This leads to low participation in election, populism etc.

2) even if we try to be good citizens we make uninformed decisions. Specific example from UK: how should we decide whether to keep a fleet of nuclear Trident submarines or axe 30,000 teacher jobs? Is the cost even comparable?

During the Brexit campaign someone once posted financial hoax on my FB feed - how much we spend on X. I went to verify the facts only to discover it is absolutely impossible to find how much we spend on anything. After hours of researching all I could find were perplexing .gov websites, unsearchable PDF documents, CSVs too big to open in excel and that obfuscated by impenetrable accounting jargon.

Compare it to this: if I ask you what were the earnings of the second movie produced by whoever produced Angelina Jolie's last movie you could probably find the answer on IMDB in less than a minute.

And I don't mean only government spending, I mean the whole public sector. States, departments, bureaus, agencies, offices, cities, towns, courts, libraries, schools, hospitals, public benefit corporations. In the end public finance is by definition public and the information should be available to everyone. If you think of it there are only 3 ways a tax dollar could leave public finance: as a salary to employees, as a payment for goods and services from private sector or as a transfer to another organisation or individual.

Build a website, get all the data, make it extremely user friendly, easy to search, navigate and share and people will start fact checking each other in FB conversations a participate more in local politics.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_Freedom_Day#Tax_Freedom_Da...

Re: Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

#180

Post by delegate »

city41 wrote: post #128
maxxxxx wrote: post #47

I am a little ambivalent about this. On the one hand the intent is probably good but on the other hand companies like YC and Silicon Valley are drivers of a lot of developments that led to the current situation. - Silicon Valley is a great example of growing inequality. Most of the rewards go disproportionally to a select few at the top - A lot of VC companies are killing a lot of previously relatively stable jobs. U…

Technology is also inevitable. Nothing you mention can be stopped. So standing up even more technology to help balance things is at the very least a noble effort.

Global nuclear war will quickly and reliably stop everything. There are powers which are very unhappy about the way technology is making them irrelevant and they see it as a fight for survival.

Civilisation is at a crossroad: continue building a high-tech society which makes humans irrelevant according to the current social/philosophical/moral norms (1) OR go back to the Dark Ages and let the powerful run the show (2).

If we want to continue with (1), we also have to quickly redefine the whole meaning of society, citizen, work, job, leadership, democracy, etc. This has to be done fast and it has to be done globally.

This will be very hard to do.

Post reply on HN