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Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

fivethirtyeight.com

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Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#41

Post by walterbell »

drcode wrote: post #31
walterbell wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the lack of privacy in Bitcoin? Couldn't that be used to regulate the decentralized agents? http://www.pds.ewi.tudelft.nl/~victor/bitcoin.html

It's easily to be arbitrarily anonymous with something like bitcoin. The only way the government could maintain attributability for bitcoin accounts would be to put in place extremely aggressive enforcement policies that (hopefully) would not be viable.

Any references on how to accomplish this? The link above says ".. for perfect anonymity, both sender and receiver have to split every complex transaction among separate pairs of throw-away identities. But at this point, transactions stop being technically atomic, in addition to the fact that the system becomes quite complicated and heavyweight."

https://bitcoin.org/en/you-need-to-know says "Bitcoin is not anonymous .. Some effort is required to protect your privacy with Bitcoin. All Bitcoin transactions are stored publicly and permanently on the network, which means anyone can see the balance and transactions of any Bitcoin address. However, the identity of the user behind an address remains unknown until information is revealed during a purchase or in other circumstances. This is one reason why Bitcoin addresses should only be used once."

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#42

Post by snowwrestler »

mason55 wrote: post #12
snowwrestler wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think big music labels are another example of corporations that have been disrupted less than folks here on HN might think. Yes, iTunes changed the music industry, but who got killed? CD retailers, primarily. The bulk of music sold through iTunes is still licensed from big labels. Spotify licenses music from the big labels. Ads, TV shows, and movies license music from big labels. Heck even the most popular videos o…

Reminds me of an article on /r/movies the other day about "XYZ didn't kill the movie industry, the movie industry killed itself". Well... no. The movie industry is far from dead and is doing quite well for itself. It even avoided the mistakes the music labels made when they gave Apple too much power (a mistake that they have since recovered from).

Some labels/studios are being hurt by piracy, primarily the mid-size and smaller independents. They have less financial leverage over their artists, but more importantly, many of them choose to limit their relationships with artists to publishing and promotion, so they are more dependent on album sales for revenue.

They also tend to more fan-friendly, so they generally choose not to fight against file sharing, etc. even though it hurts them.

These are the "middle class" level folks in those industries--making a professional living, but not getting rich. That particular stratum is being eaten away by piracy.

At the lower extremes of the industries, piracy is making it easier for new folks to get found and build an audience. But once they want to take the next step, they'll have a harder time staying out of the big company systems than folks 15 years ago. There are just fewer "mid-range" professional options available to them now.

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#43

Post by itisbiz »

"Revitalization" might be better word than "disruption" to explain what is required of corporate sector.

But corporate sector is adopting "disruptive" technologies and methods such as cloud, analytics, ecommerce. The problem is it is incremental and interstitial rather than comprehensive.

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#44

Post by drcode »

walterbell wrote: post #41
drcode wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's easily to be arbitrarily anonymous with something like bitcoin. The only way the government could maintain attributability for bitcoin accounts would be to put in place extremely aggressive enforcement policies that (hopefully) would not be viable.

Any references on how to accomplish this? The link above says ".. for perfect anonymity, both sender and receiver have to split every complex transaction among separate pairs of throw-away identities. But at this point, transactions stop being technically atomic, in addition to the fact that the system becomes quite complicated and heavyweight." https://bitcoin.org/en/you-need-to-know says "Bitcoin is not anonymous .…

CoinJoin is a technology that can be viewed as atomic in regular usage (it's a generalized way of mixing coins.) As for complicated/heavyweight, most computer technology we use today was viewed as too complicated/heavyweight a couple decades ago.

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#45

Post by bluedino »

schnable wrote: post #30

Much of what we are seeing is the effect of our insane visa and immigration policies. The traditional entrepreneurial spirit of the United States was driven by the culture of immigrants. Over 40% of the companies on the Fortune 500 were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. These were once disruptive startups. Now we make it very difficult for talented and intelligent people to become permanent residen…

We have 7-20 million illegal immigrants in the USA out of 313 million total residents.

How difficult can it really be to stay?

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#46

Post by Consultant32452 »

maxsilver wrote: post #27
michaelochurch wrote: post #21

First of all, it's pretty clear that the Valley isn't "disrupting" the establishment. It is the establishment. The elephant in the room: the death of the middle class. Thirty years ago, unions were strong and average people had savings. Venture capitalists were wealthier than average, but not of a superior class... and they still hung out with people who wrote code for a living. Class distances weren't nonexistent, b…

Agree entirely. This is a perfect write up of the situation at hand. > but one sector that isn't being targeted is the (disintegrating) middle class. So, what (if anything) can we do to fix this? Is there anything a regular person can do or work on to help the (disintegrating) middle class?

I would suggest joining unions and encouraging others to join them. With all the nonsense coming out of Google, Microsoft and others regarding wage warfare against their own employees I'm shocked that developers haven't unionized.

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#47

Post by jusben1369 »

sadface wrote: post #24

I have another suggestion for the decline in startup rates: health care and college expenses. The historically "prime" years for entrepreneurship are in one's late 30's to early 50's, years when one typically has a family in need of healthcare, college tuition, and hopefully retirement at some point down the line. In the 70's and 80's someone could leave the security of their big company, get relatively affordable pr…

I'm 100% with you. When I left my job to do my startup to maintain my health plan at current levels was $1400 per month. That's $18,000 or so a year pre tax dollars. Basically the first $25,000 a year you pay yourself is going to just having healthcare! Assuming you want a decent plan. When we were 4 people all making just enough bootstrapping before we raised 35% of our costs went to healthcare. It was never raised much if at all during the HC debates but affordable, company independent healthcare should make a meaningful difference to how many people take a chance.

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#48

Post by michaelq »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #36

So where is there a better environment for entrepreneurship? I don't mean theoretically, I mean in practice. Is there a country that has better infrastructure, capital markets, regulation and market size? I am genuinely curious.

Based on the criteria you mention (infrastructure, capital markets, regulation and market size), there most certainly isn't one. The other large countries have more onerous regulations and worse infrastructure than the US does.

But it's clearly not enough to say "the US isn't as bad as everywhere else" if everywhere else is merely drifting toward consolidation more slowly.

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#49

Post by sadface »

pyrrhotech wrote: post #33
sadface wrote: post #24

I have another suggestion for the decline in startup rates: health care and college expenses. The historically "prime" years for entrepreneurship are in one's late 30's to early 50's, years when one typically has a family in need of healthcare, college tuition, and hopefully retirement at some point down the line. In the 70's and 80's someone could leave the security of their big company, get relatively affordable pr…

I dunno, state schools are still pretty cheap. My sister's tuition with room and board is $10k per year. If you are someone smart enough to be an entrepreneur in your late 30s, you should have a corporate job paying 150k+ and can save all 4 years worth in a matter of months with a bit of determination. And health care, while expensive, isn't as big of a deal as most people make it out to be. Get a high deductible pla…

Sure, it's not impossible or nobody would be doing it, but it's still more expensive (a high deductible is still a "cost") and comes with a lower chance of success. Obviously that's going to shift trends in a more conservative direction.

Re: Corporate America Hasn’t Been Disrupted

#50

Post by superuser2 »

pyrrhotech wrote: post #33
sadface wrote: post #24

I have another suggestion for the decline in startup rates: health care and college expenses. The historically "prime" years for entrepreneurship are in one's late 30's to early 50's, years when one typically has a family in need of healthcare, college tuition, and hopefully retirement at some point down the line. In the 70's and 80's someone could leave the security of their big company, get relatively affordable pr…

I dunno, state schools are still pretty cheap. My sister's tuition with room and board is $10k per year. If you are someone smart enough to be an entrepreneur in your late 30s, you should have a corporate job paying 150k+ and can save all 4 years worth in a matter of months with a bit of determination. And health care, while expensive, isn't as big of a deal as most people make it out to be. Get a high deductible pla…

Where?!? University of Wisconsin, for example, is $24k in-state with room and board.

To get through college for $10k/year in many places, you'd need to go to one of the state's lower-tier schools in a small town and live at home. Not many state flagships are in the business of charging less than $20k.

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