Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas

Post by groks » Sun, Mar 11, 2012, 8:38 PM UTC

hackinthebochs wrote: post #347

paulhauggis wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We will have to find some sort of tax system that makes it possible for those who can't participate in the elite to also live their lives" Rather than a tax system that gives them pretty much no incentive to get a job (if you were essentially paid to do whatever you wanted to do, would you want to get a job?), it would probably be better to have government enforced jobs (IE: you want money from the government, you n…

You're line of reasoning is way off base. You're trying to shoehorn a scarcity-based economy into a post-scarcity society. The idea of "contributing" (the way its currently thought of) will have to go away completely. Private ownership is a social construct. In a post-scarcity world our ideas of private ownership will have to change. Society will simply not allow the owner of Acme robot company to literally own every…

Post by rmc » Sun, Mar 11, 2012, 10:51 PM UTC

jarek wrote: post #402

rmc wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's study history and see how Europe and America got wealthy and try to do that.

Which lands and populations do you suggest Africans raid for resources and labour?

Post by jarek » Sun, Mar 11, 2012, 11:12 PM UTC

aaronf wrote: post #400

How do you "just say you're building todo-list software" and not get laughed out of the room? Investors say the space is too crowded, and engineers joke about it being one of their first classroom assignments. And even if you're making traction on the vision to replace the inbox, Y-Combinator's partners will turn you down.

Post by jarek » Sun, Mar 11, 2012, 11:36 PM UTC

mappu wrote: post #160

harryh wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for many people it's just a receipt box There's a good startup idea right there! Sign up on receiptbox.com and give it my email username/password (or maybe some sort of oauth token). It periodically scans my email and looks for receipt emails from well known e-commerce sites. It knows how to parse them and pull out the relavent details (like TripIt does for travel stuff) and it builds a builds a nice searchable cat…

Give a third party my password so it can scan my email for financial data? No thanks. I realise there are people who would love this convenience, and you'd make a killing on targeted ads, but this is a privacy nightmare. Good luck getting people to trust you. Furthermore, you really want the results of the filtering to be applied in the user's own mail client rather than having a separate UI.. Might be feasible as a…

Post by jarek » Sun, Mar 11, 2012, 11:56 PM UTC

gbog wrote: post #348

hythloday wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether you find "they" as a third person singular pronoun objectionable, it's not "new"--it goes back to at least Shakespeare (through Austen).

I object to: - the idea that changing grammar is a way to fix moral problems. - any barrier, taboo, or artificial distance between what one think and what one write.