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Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

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Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#231

Post by ch4s3 »

sudosysgen wrote: post #229
ch4s3 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ahh, are you in Quebec? > landlords are allowed to evict if they do sufficient improvements to the property This is a REALLY unusual provision in rent stabilization laws in the US and as far as I know the EU which normally don't allow evictions like this and severely cap rent increases for improvements. If you are in Quebec, the RDL is really unique as a form of rent control in that it doesn't set prices or cap incre…

The Régie des logements in Québec absolutely does cap price increases, or even forbid them outright some years. It also does extra controls that many countries don't do, such as capping price increases even if the tenant change (the tenant needs to request the former rent, though). Allowing rent increases in the case of renovations is unusual, but not that rare either. That said, it's absolutely not "just a dispute r…

I looked to me like they don't set hard caps based on their explanation here[1], but again I'm not overly familiar with the RDL. Can you point me to a better explanation of how it works? I'm quite interested. French language sites are fine.

[1]https://www.tal.gouv.qc.ca/en/news/calculation-of-the-2020-r...

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#232

Post by tormeh »

ska wrote: post #99
umvi wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Healthcare and Basic Income would do a lot to encourage entrepreneurship Would it though? From what I understand EU has way better social safety nets, yet much smaller entrepreneurship rates compared to USA. Counter-intuitively, limitations drive innovations. When your resources are limited, you are forced to innovate. When you have infinite resources, you tend to waste it. Ever notice that when you have infinite t…

> Would it though? From what I understand EU has way better social safety nets, yet much smaller entrepreneurship rates compared to USA. This is definitely a multiple factor problem, and health care is just one of them. A couple obvious ones - social acceptance/rejection of this as a path, and government/financial friction. If you have only been exposed to the US, it's pretty shocking how hard it is to get a company…

This. Not sure about the US, but starting a company seems pretty damn daunting from where I'm standing

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#233

Post by 908B64B197 »

umvi wrote: post #77
abhiyerra wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Healthcare and Basic Income would do a lot to encourage entrepreneurship. I had to also wait till I paid off my student loans. There are a whole lot of shackles if you come from a humble background to starting a company full time. On the other hand it has never been cheaper to start a side hustle.

> Healthcare and Basic Income would do a lot to encourage entrepreneurship Would it though? From what I understand EU has way better social safety nets, yet much smaller entrepreneurship rates compared to USA. Counter-intuitively, limitations drive innovations. When your resources are limited, you are forced to innovate. When you have infinite resources, you tend to waste it. Ever notice that when you have infinite t…

> Would it though? From what I understand EU has way better social safety nets, yet much smaller entrepreneurship rates compared to USA.

Try firing an employee in France. It's a two year process minimum and in the end a judge might rule you can't do it.

Also the regulatory landscape in the EU imposes such a high burden on entrepreneurs. Coupled with investors being way more conservatives.

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#234

Post by 908B64B197 »

adenozine wrote: post #28
elliekelly wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was mentioned in Outliers , I think. I wonder what the equivalent one-in-a-billion “head start” technology is for kids today.

Call me crazy, but I think if there's any HS classes or earlier, teaching algorithmic thinking, those kids are have a crazy head start if they choose CS. I don't mean these classes where they get out and write class Dog(Animal): def bark(self): print("a Dog is barking!") but if there's young people being taught the difference between quadratic/exponential/polynomial algorithms, that's going to stew in their brains an…

> teaching algorithmic thinking

Even outside of CS this will give them a huge head start.

Functional decomposition is one of the most valuable skill one can have. Knowing what an interface is and being able to see a system as a series of layers of abstraction is too.

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#235

Post by xapata »

sudosysgen wrote: post #87
xapata wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My interpretation of the evidence leads to the opposite conclusion. Here's a good summary: https://www.slowboring.com/p/induced-demand

This article is completely orthogonal. Yes, building more pushes price down. Eventually though, you stop being able to increase density economically, and at that point the only way to prevent housing prices from increasing is rent restrictions. It's important to note that even according to your article, you need to drastically increase supply even for a modest decrease in rent. No one here is against increasing densi…

Not completely orthogonal. Perhaps they should be, but the intersection of the two sets (advocates for rent restrictions and advocates of zoning restrictions) appears to be a large portion of the total, as far as I can tell.

> enough to fix the problem

I think we need to define the problem before we start arguing solutions. In my view "can't afford the rent" is a poverty problem, not a rent prices problem. So, I want anti-poverty solutions, not rent price adjustment solutions. I view "the rent is too high" as a distinct problem from "can't afford the rent." So in my mind, rent price adjustments via price regulation are inappropriate for both problems.

> so that only productive activities ... are profitable

I understand taxing negative externalities, but this sounds anti-democratic. Who decides what's productive? Let's put an appropriate tax on pollution (broadly defined) and let the market figure out what's most productive. That's what it's good at.

> why oppose them?

I don't know of any instances where rent control didn't affect mobility. Are you considering the effect on immigration and wages in other cities? If they didn't affect mobility, then almost by definition they had no effect whatsoever. They'd have to be covering such a tiny portion of the market that they can essentially be ignored, both cost and benefit. Which makes them a waste of bureaucracy.

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#236

Post by Arainach »

Axsuul wrote: post #211
Arainach wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

....but it helps a huge amount. That's the point of this article. It's much easier to risk doing a startup when you know that no matter what, you won't have to go hungry or homeless because there's family who will help you. You're a lot less worried about pouring dollars into your 401k at age 22 if you know that you stand to eventually inherit a few million from your parents, so whatever.

I'm not denying it helps and isn't significant. But why do you need to inherit a few million just to feel secure enough to pursue entrepreneurship? Being an entrepreneur doesn't mean you have to go big or go home. There is just as much entrepreneurship with immigrants as there is with the US-born, with the former less likely to have a comfortable safety net.

Opportunity cost and time value of money. In general, if person A puts $5K a year into a 401k between ages 25-35 and then stops, while person B puts in $5K a year between ages 35-65, at age 65 person A will have a larger retirement balance despite having put in only 1/3 as much principal. This generalizes to the rest of your net worth (salary+stock) as well.

If you win the lottery and manage to have significant equity in a startup worth millions, congratulations. If not, you're faced with the prospect of being older and having minimal (or at least far fewer) assets. This is a big problem if you want to raise a family or even if you want to advance your status in life.

The economics of software are simply different. Someone good enough to start a business that brings in $10-20K MRR and barely survive is almost certainly good enough to get hired and paid $200K+ by any number of companies. If you're not going big or going home, it doesn't make sense to do a software startup these days.

Even in other industries, starting and running your own business is a LOT of work. If your goal isn't to (try to) get rich, you can almost always make more money climbing some corporate ladder for a lot fewer hours.

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#237

Post by souprock »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #117
fred_is_fred wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bill's high school also had a PDP terminal connected to UW. Basically no other high school had that - which gave him an early head start.

I logged in with a throw-away account just to refute the down vote. However, it already looks "neutralised" after my login. Assuming it is true, why would anyone done vote this comment? Makes no sense lah. Less controversial: High level, this comment seems believable. It seems reasonable and possible. Has this be written about? If yes, please kindly provide some links. I would like to read more about it. This high sc…

His high school was out of the norm, but certainly not the best. At that time, a school in LA had an IBM 360 mainframe. Having an oil rig on school property sure helps.

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#238

Post by sudosysgen »

xapata wrote: post #235
sudosysgen wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article is completely orthogonal. Yes, building more pushes price down. Eventually though, you stop being able to increase density economically, and at that point the only way to prevent housing prices from increasing is rent restrictions. It's important to note that even according to your article, you need to drastically increase supply even for a modest decrease in rent. No one here is against increasing densi…

Not completely orthogonal. Perhaps they should be, but the intersection of the two sets (advocates for rent restrictions and advocates of zoning restrictions) appears to be a large portion of the total, as far as I can tell. > enough to fix the problem I think we need to define the problem before we start arguing solutions. In my view "can't afford the rent" is a poverty problem, not a rent prices problem. So, I want…

There is a very simple definition for things that absolutely aren't productive. Things that produce nothing are not productive. Owning land is not productive, and should not be profitable at all. It is settled economics that the profitability of non-productive actions (often called rent-seeking) is bad.

It doesn't matter what your threshold for affordability is. Rent is increasing faster than economic growth, on average. It will continue increasing at this rate until a large part of the population literally cannot afford housing. You're never going to be able to solve the issue of people not being able to afford rent once it stops being economical to increase density, because there will be no incentive for landlords not to push up rent until people can't afford it anymore and start to move out (which is what we don't want to happen).

There are no cases where rent control literally did not affect mobility. There are many cases where there is rent control, and high mobility. The city in which I live has around 40% of renters move each year, which is more than enough mobility, and rent control. You do this by using the additional regulatory framework to make it easier for people to move.

Your first paragraph is literally meaningless. No one here said anything about zoning except you. If you want argue against someone else, then argue against someone else. The arguments I put forth and your response were completely orthogonal.

The rest is simply pure ideology. If you want to convince people or build a coalition with people that disagree with you, put your free-market absolutism aside and focus on solutions and problems.

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#239

Post by ampdepolymerase »

yunesj wrote: post #67
tolbish wrote: post #9

Wired covered the "myth of meritocracy" as it pertains to entrepreneurship and Silicon Valley 8 years ago: https://www.wired.com/2013/11/silicon-valley-isnt-a-meritocr...

> But if the tech scene is really a meritocracy, why are so many of its key players, from Mark Zuckerberg to Steve Jobs, white men? I disagree with the author that Jobs and Zuckerberg are evidence that meritocracy is a myth. According to Wiki: > ... Zuckerberg excelled in classes. After two years, he transferred to the private school Phillips Exeter Academy, where he won prizes in mathematics, astronomy, physics, and…

Are you aware of how much Phillip Exeter costs?

Re: Parents' income, not smarts, key to entrepreneurship

#240

Post by caskstrength »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #119
Vaslo wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While there will be a few folks that will prosper from basic income, I can’t say I’m interested in paying people to pursue things that are more like hobbies. For every entrepreneur or community volunteer that makes a difference, I fear 9 others will set their sights on being gaming streamers or will just sit around writing blogposts. If you aren’t adding value somewhere and are able minded and able bodied, I don’t wa…

> For every entrepreneur or community volunteer that makes a difference, I fear 9 others will set their sights on being gaming streamers or will just sit around writing blogposts. Providing entertainment and insight has no value to society?

People who provide good entertainment and valuable insight already collect money through subscriptions.
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