261–270 of 297 posts
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Except most entrepreneurs are from poor backgrounds. Maybe not in software but everything from lawn care to selling cocaine is entrepreneurship.
The money is in software/tech startups though.
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This is a sort of perplexing subject for me. I grew up pretty poor. We had a well, but not running water. We flushed with a bucket, bathed out of a trash can-cum-water barrel. We subsistence hunted. We had vehicles that mostly ran, most of the time. Yet I can see that I was , in fact, born into privilege. Not a privilege of money, but a privilege of priority, skills, and acceptance of risk. My parents prioritized one…
How does this land help you? What do you do with it? I'm totally lost on how a half acre in the middle of Montana does anything for you, if you already have somewhere to live. Do you just enjoy camping or something?
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Unpopular take. While I agree with the sentiment, I still think it took some fortitude to walk away from the golden handcuffs of a successful finance career to do an Internet startup at that time. Bezos said he ran the idea past his boss at the time, and the boss said something like "that's a good idea, but not for someone who already has a great job like you." So I do applaud him for that. Bloomberg made a similar t…
Nonsense. He had comfort and security to fall back on. His family was also loaded. He wasn't walking away from anything. He would have been fine if it didn't work. The reality is he had a safety net to fall back on. 99% of people do not.
Which really reflects to how most people's parents/family/society is pathetic.
Now I'm not merely talking about a safely net after one burns up millions in a startup but I'm taking about say a safety net after loosing a job etc. I think most people (like me) would be just happy to have stability in life rather than yearn for being financially successful. The precarious existence is depressing.
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The biggest thing is about "Amazon was started in a garage" is that Jeff Bezos had worked at hedge fund D.E. Shaw (founded in 1989) from 1990-1994 (that's where he met MacKenzie, she was an admin staff, he was a finance guy). So he had hedge fund money already before he founded Amazon.
It also overlooks the fact that what Amazon was doing was outright illegal for years and they never got handed their ass on a platter. For years, Amazon enabled everybody to bypass sales tax which gave Amazon a 4-8% advantage on books over brick and mortar that had to pay both rent and sales tax. Quite a few of the "successful" tech companies followed this pattern: Uber, Lyft, AirBnB, etc. all engaged in blatantly il…
Why doing something that is merely illegal deserves a punishment, in YOUR books?
Why don't you see that many laws are the in place serve some cartel or other, to be outright unjust?
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How does this land help you? What do you do with it? I'm totally lost on how a half acre in the middle of Montana does anything for you, if you already have somewhere to live. Do you just enjoy camping or something?
He's using the ultimate geriatric investment strategy: Simply being in the way of people and obstructing them, by the virtue of being born earlier. Genius.
It must have been a paradise of easy luxury a thousand years ago!
So tell me, wise one, at what age do you plan to euthanize yourself? You do know that Logan’s run was a cautionary tale, right?
Every generation builds on the scraps of the last one.
That said, uselessly being in the way is irresponsible. I do try, not always successfully, to make sure my actions are useful to people. I am pretty sure my land hobby has opened more doors for people than it has closed.
Maybe it is irresponsible to keep a boat on a slip to not be used 99 percent of the time, I’ll give you that. That’s one reason I am no longer owned by a boat.
My current hobby farm project has created 9 new homeowners and is a source of economic support and food security in the community.
Maybe stop looking to others to explain why things aren’t easy.
I love to see deserving people prosper. By deserving, I mean simply people that also love to see people prosper. That’s how we build a world. People that think that the problem with the world is that there are people in it are the actual problem.
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would you mind giving a greater explanation of what they mean by this? I couldn't grok the meaning from context, other than the obvious its not really possible to simply startup half baked out of your house or something along those lines
It means these guys didn't literally start from nothing. They had a house in the suburbs with a garage, and that implies at least some level of funding and privilege. A leg up that the guy in the trailer park might not have.
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How does this land help you? What do you do with it? I'm totally lost on how a half acre in the middle of Montana does anything for you, if you already have somewhere to live. Do you just enjoy camping or something?
Well, I did mention that I’m drunk at 3 am, buying land on eBay, right? A few places I really like and have given to my kids or other family members for a second home spot or recreational getaway. Two are located in places that it wouldn’t be unreasonable to live in full time, I let the neighbors “rent” them (for a a few pesos a year) to use for farming or whatever. One never knows how the world will shape up, maybe…
Half application of good advice is usually worse than no advice at all. I should mention that I’m basically hardcore unemployable because of my attitudes in life, and for the short periods of time that I have been an employee, I have been a poor one.
If you aren’t looking for the path of high resistance, you should probably write me off as a crackpot geezer.
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People still argue what things made a small city state (Athens) suddenly become the cornerstone of western civilization. That fact is that we have these explosions of human potential where certain groups of people in certain environments make massive leaps, and we don't what the magic sauce is. It's great when it happens, but It's foolish to think that we can somehow socially engineer the same results through brute f…
DEI is not about brute forcing an environment for success, at all. That's not the goal even a little bit. DEI is about recognizing that our culture has placed some people at a disadvantage by virtue of properties they have no control over and attempting to remedy that imbalance.
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He's using the ultimate geriatric investment strategy: Simply being in the way of people and obstructing them, by the virtue of being born earlier. Genius.
Ah yes, the reason that life is a struggle is that there are other people that got here before you lol. Funny thing, there were also people that got here before me, so I’m having a tough time with your logic. It must have been a paradise of easy luxury a thousand years ago! So tell me, wise one, at what age do you plan to euthanize yourself? You do know that Logan’s run was a cautionary tale, right? Every generation…
Much more recently than this I would say, when abandoned land was given away for free by the government to anybody who wanted it. Almost everywhere in the world, less than a hundred years ago.
Land was not always owned by somebody. I was born in a place which is very sparsely populated. Uninhabited or unused land was considered to not be owned by anybody, until a rotten generation arrived in the 50s-60s and decided that every remote piece of land had to be owned by somebody. Then there was a scramble of which families could lie the most and bribe the most to "prove" that the land was theirs. Now young people cannot live there anymore because they cannot afford to pay 200 years of their wages to have a scrap of land. They either have to be born into the landed gentry or they have to move the fuck out from where their ancestors have lived thousands of years.
> That said, uselessly being in the way is irresponsible.
But that's exactly what you're doing with abandoned land "investment", if I haven't misunderstood? When somebody actually needs that land, you are there to say "uh-uh, pay the toll first". What other reason would there be to purchase land to leave it abandoned? I have nothing to say against productive investment.
> My current hobby farm project has created 9 new homeowners and is a source of economic support and food security in the community.
That sounds like productive investment.
You buying plots of land out in the sticks is probably not the reason for my problems or for the problems of anybody else, but buying land where people need to live and then just sitting on it for a cash out is one of the most common geriatric investment strategies and has had enormously damaging effects for humanity.