Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe he's a helicopter mechanic or a million other things you can't just do at home.
Go buy 40 acres in the desert and live your dream.
If a very expensive hobby is a lot of work are you working or retired?
Buy payphones and retire
51–60 of 365 posts
Re: Buy payphones and retire
#52Slight off topic self rant: I tried this (dropshipping etc), went against all the good wisdom and rules of creating honest and passionate business. Failed miserably. Funny how brain works, I knew in 3 months that this is not honest, it feels spammy but then orders were coming in so I convinced myself that half the amazon products are doing the same thing. There is market for it then why should I not do this. This nag…
The lesson here is that there really is no free lunch. There is no secret, no-work way to make lots of money. If anyone can do it, there's little value in it so you won't make much money.
If you have thousands of dollars to invest and want to do no work, just buy index funds.
Re: Buy payphones and retire
#53Ah. Passive income. It can indeed work out for you, but it is the fact that it can work out that makes it so tempting for scammers. Warren Buffett claims that the best business that he was ever in was installing pinball machines in barber shops, then splitting the revenue with the barbers. See https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/19/warren-buffett-bought-a-25-p... for verification.
Buffett lies. He had much better investments. I likes to tell us all stories. The big-finance reality is much more inside-tradingish than he wants us all to believe.
Re: Buy payphones and retire
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would imagine that's even more attractive to them in the old days, when they dealt in coins and bills. A modern vending machine probably mostly gets credit card transactions, which are traceable.
It's easier to launder money with services than goods anyway because you don't need to dispose of excess merchandise to make the books balance. Like if you want to claim to have sold 10000 cans of soda despite only selling 1000, you need to buy 10000 cans of soda or even the most superficial review of your accounts will reveal the scheme. The ideal laundering mechanism is a service with a high ratio of price to varia…
Depends on what you want to launder. Drugs are paid for in cash, so you need to launder cash - and the best way to do that is to have a business that does some amount of cash legally. I can imagine vending machines being useful here.
You are right about needing to buy cans that you can then pretend to have sold. Unless of course you order from a supplier who is willing to write an invoice for a higher number of cans than he has sold you. I assume a more competent group would also own the supplier (though not, perhaps, on paper).
Re: Buy payphones and retire
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why would I want to retire? /../ I like working, it is my hobby and life. So you can work on things because you want to not because you have to. At least that's my plan. Not quite there yet.
Note that there are loads of things that you can't keep working on after you retire. If your company had you in a position where you ran really interesting projects, all of those are the company's projects, not yours. You got to work on them because you worked there, and once you retire you can't just keep working on them, you can't even do the same work on your own because your contract made that pretty clear: now y…
You can be "retired" (don't _need_ to work) and still have a dayjob. My father-in-law does this and works 2 days a week so he doesn't get bored and has a little more spending money, all because he likes his profession but not because he has to work for a living anymore
Re: Buy payphones and retire
#56Why would I want to retire? I am old and most my friends are boring or died after they retired. Sounds like hell on earth. I like working, it is my hobby and life.
I think the deal is when you retire you no longer have to work. You can spend your time doing whatever you want. If you don’t feel like working today, you don’t have to. If something comes up last minute, you can change your mind. If you want to move to something new and more interesting, you can.
Re: Buy payphones and retire
#57The concept of "passive income" is almost a scissor concept. Or maybe only if you couple it with the categorical imperitive.
On the one hand, it's so obviously true that it would be great to have passive income. Draw the salary you're drawing now, with some growth, and not have to work.
On the other hand, if everyone had access to this capability then society and civilization would grind to a halt. People make things; if people don't make things, then we don't eat, we don't drink. If the goal is to have a system where everyone can have passive income, then achieving that goal is the end of the world.
The categorical imperative roughly says that something is moral only if its universal adoption would benefit society. So there is a break there. The idea of passive income is isomorphic to rent seeking, which we generally agree is a bad thing.
Re: Buy payphones and retire
#58[flagged]
You are getting downvoted so heavily that I can barely read your comment.
Unfortunately HN has a hate for AI, but any writer should expect to demonstrate right of the bat that you have something worthwhile to share. Most stuff posted online is not worth reading. The article failed to demonstrate that, and it had the style of "I need to pad this to reach some kind of minimum word count".
I think reading the article was worth it, but thanks to the the style I was about to quit several times. Your solution of runnning it through an LLM would certainly have been a better outcome than this.
Re: Buy payphones and retire
#59Slight off topic self rant: I tried this (dropshipping etc), went against all the good wisdom and rules of creating honest and passionate business. Failed miserably. Funny how brain works, I knew in 3 months that this is not honest, it feels spammy but then orders were coming in so I convinced myself that half the amazon products are doing the same thing. There is market for it then why should I not do this. This nag…
Sorry for you losing your confidence over this. To be frank, the idea itself of creating a company is spammy. I created my company, but I knew the market from inside (it wasn’t a public company so it wasn’t insider trading, but clearly I had unfair advantage at start). I’ve witnessed many people on the same market as I was, trying to find something to sell, and failing at it. Everyone here is told that they can do it…
That is a great reframing! Thanks for saying this. This is what I am planing to do next, implement all these skills for meaningful business and help them grow.
Re: Buy payphones and retire
#60Slight off topic self rant: I tried this (dropshipping etc), went against all the good wisdom and rules of creating honest and passionate business. Failed miserably. Funny how brain works, I knew in 3 months that this is not honest, it feels spammy but then orders were coming in so I convinced myself that half the amazon products are doing the same thing. There is market for it then why should I not do this. This nag…
The lesson here is that there really is no free lunch. There is no secret, no-work way to make lots of money. If anyone can do it, there's little value in it so you won't make much money. If you have thousands of dollars to invest and want to do no work, just buy index funds.
Very true, I did exactly this.