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I am done. I give up

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: I am done. I give up

#841

Post by prottog »

danaris wrote: post #805
prottog wrote: post #778

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody anywhere gets very wealthy just by working hard. Otherwise the world would be filled with millionaire janitors. > if you're using the excess to make yourself more money, rather than help improve other people's lives, you are being selfish at a level that makes you effectively indistinguishable from evil. If you're using your business to create value for millions of people, you are in fact improving millions of…

If you use your business to make life easier for millions of people, that's good. If you take enough profit to make billions of dollars for yourself, that's bad. Because no one person (or family) can ever realize anything resembling a proportionate benefit from that money, all you're doing is raising your dollar-denominated high score, at the expense of all the other people you could be helping more if you invested t…

When someone becomes rich through this path, they aren't rolling around with a billion dollars in a vault Scrooge McDuck style. Almost all of their wealth that isn't taxed is already tied in their own business or in investments in other businesses, so they're already doing the things that you say will make it work for the world. Even the little bit of liquid money they keep in the bank is loaned out to other profit-seeking entrepreneurs.

Once again, profit is not immoral. It serves as an important signal for capital to be directed in the value-creation cycle that ends up producing wealth for everyone. In the words of Isabel Paterson: "Production is profit; and profit is production. They are not merely related; they are the same thing. When a man plants potatoes, if he does not get back more than he put in, he has produced nothing."

You are saying that if a man who planted potatoes harvests them and keeps some for himself above and beyond what he needs to subsist, he is evil. I'm really not sure how you justify that position.

Re: I am done. I give up

#842

Post by pclmulqdq »

Retric wrote: post #648
pclmulqdq wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US military spending is 4% of GDP. When a warmonger is president, that goes up to about 6% of GDP. The NATO commitment is 2% of GDP. It is not particularly extreme. The real drag is the US healthcare system, which effectively finances most of the medical R&D for the US, India, South America, and Europe, and also provides ridiculous levels of treatment for people who are about to die (in comparison to other health sys…

Officially it’s $1.64 Trillion in 2022 on defense vs ~23.4 Trillion GDP or 7% GDP. https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=... You can see different numbers based on if you include stuff like the DoE spending on nuclear weapon ‘stewardship’ or only parts of the coast guard, national guard, VA etc. US healthcare spending hardly subsidizes the rest of the world. Paperwork and insurance overhead don’…

That's the budget. The actual outlays are less than $1 billion. Around 3-4% for the last few years.

Re: I am done. I give up

#843

Post by kh0st »

zbird wrote: post #794
rapind wrote: post #704

> It's also the constant stream of digital nomad influencers on Twitter who sell extremely distorted, rosy, and often times false dreams to indie entrepreneurs like myself. They make it seem like building a successful startup is easy and anyone can do it with the right mindset and a few key tips. This is just startup porn. It’s the same in any category (make money flipping houses!, crypto!, etc.) As a rule of thumb,…

I don't understand how OP could take that seriously. I can't think of anyone who has built a successful business and can trace their origins back to "I was very inspired by people on Twitter". I thought it would have been obvious that real success takes real work. "Digital influencers" are nothing more than sad people craving for attention online. Their success relies on idiots trying to mimic their "success". It's a…

And you're really almost hitting the point directly - but this guy just seems to "want" to be the owner of a tech-startup, rather then someone with a good tech idea who then turns it into a successful business.

Everyone is selling a dream, and people are willing to buy because they fall in love with the "idea" of the dream - I think unless I had some actually insane, never thought of tech, I would NEVER want to be a tech-startup. Everyone is trying to take advantage of you to fulfil their own dreams, ironically

Re: I am done. I give up

#844

Post by kirse »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #614

"Human History [...] is the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy." --C. S. Lewis

If viewed in the narrow interpretation that you're presenting it, then sure, trying and failing at startups is "something other than God". Maybe that is his frustration.

But if building a startup is simply part of the process of tested faith through challenges, being stripped of ulterior motives, servant leadership, creating something from nothing, bringing order & structure to chaos, enabling people to feed families, then it's quite on par with discovering who God is.

Work itself is a divine activity given from the very beginning, certainly not meant to be our god but about as divinely predestined as one can get on the list of "things one can be doing". I mean shoot, one of the first tasks was to name things, what else is programming other than naming things?

Re: I am done. I give up

#845

Post by kh0st »

It sounds like you fell in love with the idea of "the tech-start up dream"... Willing to sleep in the closet at HQ to fulfil that dream, put your heart and soul into it - but don't have matching tech. And I get it, that's backwards.

But deciding to be an inventor is a tough road to walk.

And being in the tech-start up space you are going to be dealing with vipers and scorpions - not ideal. And even if YOU have a perfect idea - your chances of success are still slim.

Start small and build up. You don't need a facility, team, or anything but the smallest decent product. Build it, the rest will come.

But these influencers are going to destroy us all. Avoid for advice at all costs.

Re: I am done. I give up

#846

Post by jwr »

mrobins wrote: post #170
jwr wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This . I really dislike the term "lifestyle business". What's wrong with a stable long-term business that makes founders and customers happy? Why does every business need GROWTH GROWTH GROWTH at all costs, even if the result is a net negative for customers? I sometimes explain to customers that if my business were VC-funded, it would grow and be developed much faster, but in the end there would need to be an exit and…

> What's wrong with a stable long-term business that makes founders and customers happy? And employees.

Yes, true. I forgot to mention them because I don't have (or plan to have) any :-)

Re: I am done. I give up

#847

Post by jwr »

WJW wrote: post #622
mrobins wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's wrong with a stable long-term business that makes founders and customers happy? And employees.

Last weekend I was talking to one of the initial employees of a relatively well-known monitoring SAAS here in the Netherlands. Apparently their founder/owner had just decided that ~30 employees was perhaps a few too many and that he would like to keep it more lifestyle-business-ish. Fair enough, he's the owner and is allowed to make decisions like that. This early employee was doing some real heart-searching about wh…

Seriously curious -- what "career" growth do people imagine? Apart from learning new things (which that employee can still do), what would he be looking for? Managing people? More power? Different position on a business card?

Re: I am done. I give up

#848

Post by tosc »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #834
tosc wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>!Without the state to at least enforce laws, enforce property rights, and physically protect you, there wouldn't even be any wealth creation. This is the kind of minimalist state that libertarians would agree to. People talk about robbery when the state is spending money on arbitrary things.

Arbitrary? Or just things they don't agree with?

Arbitrary in the sense of non-essential things that governments spend other people’s money on.

The fact that most people don’t agree is why tax is taken by force.

Re: I am done. I give up

#849

Post by Retric »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #842
Retric wrote: post #648

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Officially it’s $1.64 Trillion in 2022 on defense vs ~23.4 Trillion GDP or 7% GDP. https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=... You can see different numbers based on if you include stuff like the DoE spending on nuclear weapon ‘stewardship’ or only parts of the coast guard, national guard, VA etc. US healthcare spending hardly subsidizes the rest of the world. Paperwork and insurance overhead don’…

That's the budget. The actual outlays are less than $1 billion. Around 3-4% for the last few years.

The only way outlays are under 1 Trillion is if you ignore a great deal of defense spending. A classic trick is to hide future obligations like pensions and other benefits from current spending numbers, but if you need to hand out a pension to get people to work for you then obviously you should include either current spending in past obligations or the amount of additional obligations your adding this year as spending.

So yes, you can get imaginary defense costs to ~4%, but I ask you where is the coast guard, national guard, DoE, or VA’s budget here? “The budget funds five branches of the U.S. military: the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Space Force.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_... Some might argue the national guard isn’t defense spending but we sent 250,000 guard members to Iraq and the guard is fielding F-35’s.

I will acknowledge some some outliers like the United States Border Patrol, while it’s job is literally defending the border it probably shouldn’t be included in defense spending.

PS: It gets even sillier, not that long ago we where hiding the cost of the Iraq war from defense spending numbers.

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