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Is it OK to Want to Make Money?

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Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?

#131

Post by Mz »

scotty79 wrote: post #82
paulhauggis wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

want to travel? that requires money want a house? you need money Want to have kids? more money Almost every hobby also requires money. Money buys you freedom. I have a hunger for freedom, which requires money. I also don't want some asshole boss making decisions for me.

I hate inconveniences of travelling and after I have travelled I quickly forget almost all of the things I've seen or experienced. Nearly same amount of memories remain in my head regardless of whether I've been into 3 or 30 places. I don't want a house. I prefer flats. While living in a flat you just have to bother with what's inside. House is much greater burden. You don't buy kids. Kids happen. If I had kids then…

Let me respectfully suggest you do not need a hunger for money as it looks to me you have a type of wealth which mere money cannot buy. There is a saying (which I cannot find) to the effect that real wealth is about not being needy. I would also suggest that there are downsides to being rich a la the song line "I've got dozens of friends and the fun never ends, that is as long as I'm buying." I tend to have a yawning disinterest in money. I am currently homeless and deeply in debt...etc...and thus resolving my financial problems is currently a very high priority. Yes, it is okay to want to make money. But I see no reason to think a hunger for wealth is pure virtue. All things have both good points and bad points.

Peace and best of luck.

Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?

#132

Post by [deleted] »

3pt14159 wrote: post #120
gxs wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I've come to expect hypocrisy from anyone with a strongly held value set. I think that succinctly sums it up. The problem with "values" is that they are an excuse to never have to think critically. Something comes up, you just tag it with a "value" and act accordingly. It simple, it works, and you never have to think! I don't understand what part of thinking is so taxing that you can't take a couple minutes to mak…

I get where you are coming from on this, but honestly sometimes things are just subclasses (in the programming sense) of something that you have thought a lot about and ultimately completely rejected. For example: "The government should sometimes run things that private industry can run and compete upon" is the super class of "the government should run envelope delivery" so why should I not just dismiss the second st…

[deleted]

Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?

#133

Post by akiselev »

nirvana wrote: post #12
masenghi wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Virtually every legal way I know of making money helps society. HFT and Domain squatting are legal.

This is why I said "Virtually". Seriously, think about what you've just said. Do you realize that you didn't even make a claim, you simply imply that these are somehow not beneficial to society as if it were a fact? Don't you realize that you should have made an argument here, if you're going to make that claim? Making a counter argument is simple: HFT adds liquidity giving better prices to traders, and domain squatt…

While it is true that most of this discussion is a false dichotomy much of your claim is based upon the statement "Virtually every legal way I know of making money helps society" which is coming from ignorance. I doubt you have a firm grasp of how many jobs there are, what kind of value they produce, or how to quantify that value (I don't think anyone has even a basic grasp of one of these factors let alone all three).

However, one thing I don't understand is why everyone keeps talking about industries that fall largely outside of the scope of Silicon Valley. This post seems to be directed at entrepreneurs (I would guess that most employees of SV tech startups are paid more than the rest of the tech sector anyway) and it seems counterproductive to steer the discussion in the direction of the finance, law, medical, or any other industry which are (I would think) drastically different situations.

Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?

#134

Post by gxs »

3pt14159 wrote: post #120
gxs wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I've come to expect hypocrisy from anyone with a strongly held value set. I think that succinctly sums it up. The problem with "values" is that they are an excuse to never have to think critically. Something comes up, you just tag it with a "value" and act accordingly. It simple, it works, and you never have to think! I don't understand what part of thinking is so taxing that you can't take a couple minutes to mak…

I get where you are coming from on this, but honestly sometimes things are just subclasses (in the programming sense) of something that you have thought a lot about and ultimately completely rejected. For example: "The government should sometimes run things that private industry can run and compete upon" is the super class of "the government should run envelope delivery" so why should I not just dismiss the second st…

I think if you take the time to see if something is actually an edge case or not, you'll see that we are arguing the same thing.

Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?

#135

Post by refurb »

michaelochurch wrote: post #60

Answer: yes, sure. It's far more honorable to want to be wealthy than, for example, to vie for social status or power over other people. I want to be wealthy; I wish everyone were. I feel like I'm an old (28) knight, having learned the hard way that people are not honorable. For the record, I've seen more disgusting behavior in supposedly "world-changing" startups than many people see in their lives, and far more tha…

> There's nothing wrong with wanting to have financial freedom and autonomy. If you don't have these things, chances are that your life will amount to very little.

I can think of a long list of people that have had a huge impact on improving people's lives who never had much of either: Martin Luther King Jr., Mother Theresa, Gandhi, etc, etc

People who have had more impact on people's lives than anyone who has come out of SV.

Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?

#136

Post by mikeash »

3pt14159 wrote: post #120
gxs wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I've come to expect hypocrisy from anyone with a strongly held value set. I think that succinctly sums it up. The problem with "values" is that they are an excuse to never have to think critically. Something comes up, you just tag it with a "value" and act accordingly. It simple, it works, and you never have to think! I don't understand what part of thinking is so taxing that you can't take a couple minutes to mak…

I get where you are coming from on this, but honestly sometimes things are just subclasses (in the programming sense) of something that you have thought a lot about and ultimately completely rejected. For example: "The government should sometimes run things that private industry can run and compete upon" is the super class of "the government should run envelope delivery" so why should I not just dismiss the second st…

Because firmly dismissing such a broad statement is rarely correct. Life is full of subtlety and ambiguity. There are no concrete laws of life like there are laws of physics. To simply state that something so general is treu or false is to refuse to consider that individual situations won't fit within such clean theoretical lines.

There's nothing wrong with values and principles. It's almost impossible to reason through everything in life completely, since everything is so complex. Values and principles give you something to fall back on when reason runs out. The trouble comes when people use values and principles as an excuse to not even bother trying to reason through things, as you are advocating here. Values and principles are simply heuristics. They can work decently in some cases, but when something better than a basic heuristic is available, you want to use it.

Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?

#137

Post by andrewfelix »

anc7937 wrote: post #69
andrewfelix wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're referring to "trickle-down economics" which is largely bunk.

No, that's not. You have no idea what you're talking about. Keynesian economics, for instance, uses a similar example to justify government spending. You seriously should stop resorting to trite talking points and buzzwords you really don't understand because you're just corroding the conversation.

>"You have no idea what you're talking about."

>"You seriously should stop resorting to trite talking points and buzzwords"

Who's corroding the conversation? Keep it civil buddy.

Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?

#138

Post by oz »

illumin8 wrote: post #104
oz wrote: post #72

TL;DR: Yes. Get that money. Get lots of it. Poverty sucks. I left rural Jamaica to come to Kingston, the capital, in 2005. After my first year in college, I got a summer job with a telecom startup run by an American. My student loan was not renewed for the 2nd year, so I had to drop out, and got a permanent position as a sysadmin at the company. The pay sucked, but I didn't care: The family member I was living with w…

> I'd been a typical HN-reading, Ayn Rand-quoting, John Galt aspiring-libertarian. Slowly, I began to realize the role of luck and circumstance. I used to look down on the poor, writing them all off as lazy and not willing to work. "How dare they be poor and have a TV!", I used to think. Wow. I've come to expect a certain level of hypocrisy from a lot of libertarians, but this is a pretty stark example of it. By all…

Glad to share it. And don't make me quote Francisco's Money Speech! :)

>By all rights, you qualified as one of the "moochers," yet you were perfectly happy to denounce those like you.

This is one of the things that worries me the most about human nature. Luckily, I've stumbled upon LessWrong which has dramatically improved my thinking. But I constantly have to ask myself, "Where are my blind spots?"

Re: Is it OK to Want to Make Money?

#140

Post by paulhauggis »

scotty79 wrote: post #82
paulhauggis wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

want to travel? that requires money want a house? you need money Want to have kids? more money Almost every hobby also requires money. Money buys you freedom. I have a hunger for freedom, which requires money. I also don't want some asshole boss making decisions for me.

I hate inconveniences of travelling and after I have travelled I quickly forget almost all of the things I've seen or experienced. Nearly same amount of memories remain in my head regardless of whether I've been into 3 or 30 places. I don't want a house. I prefer flats. While living in a flat you just have to bother with what's inside. House is much greater burden. You don't buy kids. Kids happen. If I had kids then…

"I hate inconveniences of travelling and after I have travelled I quickly forget almost all of the things I've seen or experienced. Nearly same amount of memories remain in my head regardless of whether I've been into 3 or 30 places."

Not me. Are you traveling to the same areas? I can certainly say traveling through China gave me many new and interesting memories.

"You don't buy kids. Kids happen. If I had kids then probably I'd need more money than I do now, but kids didn't happen to me yet."

yeah, well, that's not a good way to think. The people that I know that just let kids 'happen' now have very little options because they have an extra mouth to feed without thinking about the extra income that this requires. It's also not a good thing to bring a kid into the world only to live at or below the poverty line. Another consequence of letting kids "happen".

"Every hobby also requires time. And time is neatly eaten up by all my hobbies that don't require money and by some work I do."

So you your work is your hobby. This is fine. But it's not the case for a lot of other people. Work has also been my hobby for 15 years, but there are so many other things that I've found in the last couple of years that require money.

Aside from programming and exercising, most hobbies require money.

"Especially because to fund the new hobby I'd have to increase time devoted to work and reduce time devoted to current hobbies further."

This is why I only get into businesses where my time is not directly proportional to the money I make. It's a losing battle.

"My freedom does not require a lot of money. I'm 33 and I never had a boss."

It's because you're living like a 21 year-old. It's fun, but loses it's appeal after awhile.

"I could travel much more than I like. I could get a house. I could replace my hobbies with new paid ones. I could have kids. But isn't this a bit much to just get "money hunger"? I want to increase my motivation but not at the cost of doing things that would tire me to tears."

I feel like this is like trying to describe an emotion to someone that has never felt one.

In addition to the freedom that money provides, I also want to help out people in my family that are less fortunate/don't have as many opportunities.

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