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Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

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Re: Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

#121

Post by hdctambien »

jeromec wrote: post #109
timr wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But there are bright minds working on new antibiotics, energy efficient cars, cheaper building materials etc. Some of the best and brightest minds are also smashing atoms in particle accelerators, charting the cosmos, composing symphonies, educating new minds, and, yes, pushing the limits of computer connectedness to make many lives on this planet just that much nicer." Speaking as one of those people who took a nic…

Irrational or not, my opinion is that the world would be 1000% better if we could somehow create an economy that rewarded young people for doing research into antibiotics half as well as it rewards them for creating social-networking widgets. I agree. It's also a shame that a professional basketball player makes around 100 times more than a professional school teacher. That's just how it is.

Professional athletes making too much money is not the cause of professional teachers making too little money.

Hundreds of thousands of people are willing to pay $25 - $1000 for a ticket to a basketball game to see those professional basketball players play, which earns them their 100xTeacher salary.

Even more people want to pay less taxes which go to the pay of professional (public) school teachers.

But wouldn't it also be a shame if professional basketball players were being paid $30,000 and the left over billions of dollars were split between the 30 owners of those teams? I'm willing to bet that the rich basketball players give back more dollars to their communities than the even richer basketball team owners do (or even would if they held back that extra money from the players).

People not getting paid for doing something that other people pay for them to do is a shame. Right now, people are not willing to pay for professional (public) teachers to teach. (Some people are able, and do, pay for professional private school teachers to teach.... if they aren't getting paid enough then they are in the same position that an NBA player would be in if their team owners were keeping all the money for themselves.)

Re: Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

#122

Post by agentultra »

And in the meantime, ask yourself, “Does my work as a technologist really help people? Am I solving a real problem, or am I chasing personal success?” If you don’t like the answer, change something about what you do or how you do it.

Tall order.

Also, can personal success not align with more humanitarian goals?

Re: Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

#123

Post by gaius »

hdctambien wrote: post #121
jeromec wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irrational or not, my opinion is that the world would be 1000% better if we could somehow create an economy that rewarded young people for doing research into antibiotics half as well as it rewards them for creating social-networking widgets. I agree. It's also a shame that a professional basketball player makes around 100 times more than a professional school teacher. That's just how it is.

Professional athletes making too much money is not the cause of professional teachers making too little money. Hundreds of thousands of people are willing to pay $25 - $1000 for a ticket to a basketball game to see those professional basketball players play, which earns them their 100xTeacher salary. Even more people want to pay less taxes which go to the pay of professional (public) school teachers. But wouldn't it…

Teachers have freely chosen their economic situation. The price of a job for life is that a good teacher's salary will be averaged with their colleagues who are utterly incompetent (who went into teaching knowing full well that once they got their foot in the door they would be untouchable).

If teachers want to improve their lot, they'll disband their unions. A pro athlete can lose his place on the team in a heartbeat...

Re: Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

#124

Post by Retric »

gaius wrote: post #95
prodigal_erik wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Economic incentive is how we allocate resources. Expecting big brains to defy what the market currently wants is not only a huge personal sacrifice but it may even prevent them from succeeding. Organizations (mostly governments) that want betterment of the world should be paying the market more to efficiently deliver it.

Well, yes and no. In theory it sounds like it ought, but look at fusion research: for the last 50 years it's always been 30 years away, which by sheer coincidence is about the length of a post-doc career. And look at the old Soviet Empire or China today: their central planning ought to have made it possible to attract talent to "grand challenge" projects, but it just isn't happening.

Fast track fusion is about 15 years away. DEMO is supposed to deliver a useful about of net power. Granted ITER has been delayed ~15 years and the best reactor in the world was built in the 80's, but that's more about funding than research.

Re: Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

#125

Post by swah »

jasonkester wrote: post #49

It occurs to me that my latest project actually gets me off the hook from this guy. Problem: People in developing countries have to work for 3rd world wages, selling products and services to people who really can't afford to buy anything. Thus, they are doomed to remain poor by western standards. Solution: Jason's website that lets them teach Spanish online to rich Americans, and doesn't let them pay themselves less…

OTOH, people in 3rd world countries that have fast internet access and get to know your startup aren't probably the ones interested in teaching spanish to americans. I know I won't.

Re: Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

#126

Post by markkat »

timr wrote: post #22
replicatorblog wrote: post #15

I didn't find the reasoning in this article very sound and the heated "high school angst" quotes hurt its credibility. e.g. "These products feed and profit from our bovine adoration of mindless time-wasting." That said, to address her point, I don't understand why tech start ups would be the answer to everything, especially a complex problem like homelessness. Homelessness isn't going to be solved by some RoR hacker…

"Homelessness isn't going to be solved by some RoR hacker creating a website that matches the homeless with available space. Rather it is the challenge for social workers, mental health practitioners, etc." I think you're missing the larger point: when the best and the brightest technological minds are chasing the instant riches of social networks for dogs, they're not creating new antibiotics, energy efficient cars,…

Ha! I am in cancer research and am trying to get into this wacky social-network-hoo-hah business. -I guess I am going to hell. :)

Funny thing is, what you are saying has a lot of truth to it. Funding for basic research is low, very competitive, and thus, dominated by nepotism and politics within the scientific community. Although politicians love to say that we need more scientists, as a scientist, I disagree. Until we decide to better fund the scientists we have, please please, no more!

But yes, economic forces, as it were...

Re: Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

#127

Post by Bostwick »

I think my main problem with the article is that the three big, meaningful problems it presents are so vague as to be virtually unsolvable.

Let's use facebook as an example. Here's a problem: The internet and modern society drives people apart and increases isolation. Facebook's effect has been to greatly decrease this problem, but it's not the problem that Facebook set out to solve. The web app that Zuckerman copied and extended was designed as catalog of who was in a dormitory (house) at Harvard. It just so happened that adding on messaging features and massively scaling this over time created a startup that also helps solve a larger social problem.

The problems the author presents as "real" problems are so ill-defined that it is impossible for technology startups to solve them. But, for people who actually work in those areas, I'm sure there exist problems web-apps could solve.

Here's an example: the problem of "Many Americans can't afford medical care." The cause of the high cost of health care is complex, relating to R&D at pharmaceutical companies, patent law, government regulations, and market incentives. Programming won't solve that. However, a problem that programmers _can_ solve is "electronic medical records suck." To that end, there are programmers working on that, and, hopefully, their work will uncover smaller problems also solvable.

I see large, ill-defined problems like this as a bit like the beginning of a recursive problem. The big problem needs to be broken down into a large series of smaller problems, some of which we, as programmers and entrepreneurs, may be able to solve. The hard part is knowing how to break the large problem into smaller ones, and the acknowledging the efforts of those people working on the smaller problems.

Re: Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

#128

Post by hdctambien »

gaius wrote: post #123
hdctambien wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Professional athletes making too much money is not the cause of professional teachers making too little money. Hundreds of thousands of people are willing to pay $25 - $1000 for a ticket to a basketball game to see those professional basketball players play, which earns them their 100xTeacher salary. Even more people want to pay less taxes which go to the pay of professional (public) school teachers. But wouldn't it…

Teachers have freely chosen their economic situation. The price of a job for life is that a good teacher's salary will be averaged with their colleagues who are utterly incompetent (who went into teaching knowing full well that once they got their foot in the door they would be untouchable). If teachers want to improve their lot, they'll disband their unions. A pro athlete can lose his place on the team in a heartbea…

When a specific pro athlete loses his place on a team, he is replaced by another pro athlete that will absorb the money.

While not being able to easily remove (or identify) bad teachers is a problem, the solution to that issue will not increase the pool of money available to pay the remaining good teachers (unless the solution involves removing but not replacing the bad teachers)

A teacher's salary is less "an average of the salary of their colleagues" as it is a division of the money allocated to education from taxes (and fundraisers).

Re: Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

#129

Post by mmorris »

daeken wrote: post #97
Empact wrote: post #92

Alright, a few of the top comments point out the good of the Foursquares and Facebooks of the world. Except, that's not the point - on anything beyond the personal scale the question is not, "which of these two do we want?" but "how much of each do we want?" She asks: "How well are our resources allocated?" I think there's a strong case that we're under-invested in some of the largest problems of society - personally…

I also have to ask: Where are all the education startups? We have a massive, high-speed communication tool and I don't see much changing with respect to education. There are a few things out there (the Khan Academies of the world), but they're very few and far between.

While it may not be considered by most as a "startup" at this point, I think that in the long run Wikipedia will have a major impact on education, in the sense of the knowledge base of the average individual.

I can't quantify the amount I've learned from wikipedia articles over the years, but I'm quite certain it's an awful lot. If I had grown up with access to it I'm pretty sure the impact would be far greater.

Sure, when I was a kid we had an encyclopedia, but A) a lot of kids don't, and B) wikipedia is thousands of times more powerful than an encyclopedia (and reading one article will often lead one down a path through various other articles too).

Is it going to replace public schools? Obviously not. But it has and will change education for the better.

Re: Bread and Circuses: The State of Web App Startups

#130

Post by timr »

maxawaytoolong wrote: post #113
timr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Homelessness isn't going to be solved by some RoR hacker creating a website that matches the homeless with available space. Rather it is the challenge for social workers, mental health practitioners, etc." I think you're missing the larger point: when the best and the brightest technological minds are chasing the instant riches of social networks for dogs, they're not creating new antibiotics, energy efficient cars,…

People who are smart enough to be writing social networks are more than smart enough to be doing pharmaceutical research or inventing solar cookers for the third world. This is the lament of the unhappy programmer. If only I didn't have to work my soul-less yuppie job tuning database queries for youface.com I could be curing cancer. It might be therapeutic to think this but it's mostly just a strange form of depressi…

"This is the lament of the unhappy programmer. If only I didn't have to work my soul-less yuppie job tuning database queries for youface.com I could be curing cancer. It might be therapeutic to think this but it's mostly just a strange form of depressive narcissism....All the people working here are doing exactly what they were meant to do."

Ah, yes...the world is so much simpler when it's in black and white, isn't it?

Aside from the fact that it's entirely possible to enjoy a career and still see its deficiencies, you're just making assertions and pretending they're factual.

Unless you believe that all of the people who are coding social networks today were absolutely miserable with their careers a decade ago, your typical smart person could be happy doing many different things. Just because they're writing flash games today doesn't mean that's automatically the optimal job for their happiness and the well-being of the world. Capitalism doesn't optimize for what you seem to think it does.

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