I'm surprised that HN hasn't applied some version of the standard critique of Capitalism already. It's practically de rigueur in fashionable intellectual circles. And in this case it's so easy, an amateur like me can make a decent stab at it. First of all, we enter the text with a remark about "mistakes of ego". One ego mistake is to conflate "life" with some activity that is taken to be "life-defining" or "the meani…
Bushnell sees dead people.
Perhaps he's right, but maybe not in the way he expects.
How many companies have you started by the time you're 18? If the answer's zero, I wouldn't invest in you. After his breakout success in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mr Bushnell made several missteps that eventually led to some entrepreneurial failures and financial ruin. That's fine, I wouldn't invest in you, either.
Losing 30 million sounds like a much better (negative) indicator on whether to invest in someone than how many companies they started by 18.
> "I've always valued passionate employees over anything else, and, it turns out that there's a huge percentage of the population that are actually dead - they don't know it, but, in terms of their processes, they're just waiting to be buried" I'm sure he did value passionate employees, especially in light of the positive way in which describes Jobs sleeping under his desk (and the poor bastards described in the arti…
This was just one step in an incredible journey for Steve Jobs. He probably put in the long hours because he saw value in those hours. He probably learned a lot from the experience.
Yep. Like getting Woz (who had a day job) to come in out of hours and do a lot of the work, then take the credit for it, and then not give Woz a fair share of the bonus...
>"How many companies have you started by the time you're 18? If the answer's zero, I wouldn't invest in you," he says of their entrepreneurial verve. Jesus christ, really? That sounds like a hideous childhood to me. Is this what we're becoming, a race of people obsessed with capital and business and work? Go play in the dirt and ride your bike, kid. Work when you're old.
I've hung out with him a few times. He's actually a really fun, down-to-earth guy (he loves cracking really, really stupid jokes). He's also a really passionate, ambitious person, and he's just not capable of dreaming small. When he decides to do something, he's in, 100%, and he values that same kind of ambition in other people. That doesn't mean you have to be a workaholic as a kid, it just means you were passionate enough about something to go out and do something about it (when I was a kid, I started a stupid video game magazine — because it was fun).
I'm surprised that HN hasn't applied some version of the standard critique of Capitalism already. It's practically de rigueur in fashionable intellectual circles. And in this case it's so easy, an amateur like me can make a decent stab at it. First of all, we enter the text with a remark about "mistakes of ego". One ego mistake is to conflate "life" with some activity that is taken to be "life-defining" or "the meani…
Bushnell sees dead people. Perhaps he's right, but maybe not in the way he expects.
It's hard for anyone in a capitalist society, stuck in the socio-sick-environment to erase the conflation of monetary success with freedom. So we falsely assume a grind, a saturday crunch, for the "small" underdog-company-spin-of-the-wheel means that you have a company of all loyal, blood-brotherly employees. It's a nice thought if 1) the company ends up being successful, and 2) the employees actually have a bit of equity. But most of the time, these spiritual kind of ideas and feelings are just abused to justify treating employees like shit to exact a capitalistic work efficiency from them. It's definitely an airy kind of issue. And I'm not sold on the whole 'crunch' thing. Though as a programmer, when I work on my own projects, I know that crunching means I'm passionate. So it's very hard to separate that and have some solidarity for a normal work situation where I have balance and yet feel as if I'm not just "sucking" on the situation for a slow rolling accomodating situation, and well, that whole 'slow burial.' Maybe I am just slowly rotting away with my current passion for work. Just maybe..
Which is a problem with incentives around investing, not with normal, "well-adjusted" people. It should be pretty clear now that the market strives to remove all human values not relevant to increasing abstract profit numbers. We are literally losing our humanity over this. And the best thing? If we continue, it may well end up that an automated economy will become a closed loop, running by itself without the need fo…
Hasn't this already happened with HFTs? Some terrifyingly large proportion of the money markets runs on pure code already - which is terrifying because we're not even a democracy now, but some kind of bizarre automated profit-seeking cybernetic metacreature.
What's a democracy in your book? Who's `we', and were they ever a democracy?