211–220 of 225 posts
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That kind of ignores how human bodies work when tired and sleep deprived.
I am definitely not celebrating it. It seems obvious to me that the human with the most stamina will have an edge in any sort of competition that involves hard work, from marathons to startups.
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I doubt even a middle-middle class family could attain their standard of living, within 100 miles of where they lived. Their house was around 1200 sq ft, 3 bedrooms, and is valued at $500k today.
> Their house was around 1200 sq ft That's rather unlikely. The average new home size in 1960 was less than 1000 sq ft (it's over 2500 sq ft today), and pretty much all existing stock at that point was under 1000 sq ft. Meanwhile, most urban apartments were SROs or what would today be called studios. Over the decades, the houses got additions and the apartments had interior walls knocked out and got combined. Our obs…
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That kind of ignores how human bodies work when tired and sleep deprived.
I am definitely not celebrating it. It seems obvious to me that the human with the most stamina will have an edge in any sort of competition that involves hard work, from marathons to startups.
Wealthier males work more because they have access to better paid, more fulfilling and more prestigious kind of work. Poor males work less due to the fact that they have access only to shitty jobs with shitty pays and no prestige, so, for a lot of poor people, working may actually degrade your quality of life, since you won't be able to match or improve upon the lifestyle your parents provided you.
Women work more because they need to, either because they have children to take care off by themselves or because they've grown up watching the suffering of their mothers due to the oppression on females in society, and they sure as hell don't want that for themselves.
People mostly buy stuff to show off, and then lie to themselves that it is because they like the stuff they bought, illusion of power. Being well off doesn't really matter socially if people don't know about it, bragging is seen as offensive so people do it in an indirect way, by purchasing expensive stupid shit, so that they can feel they're not just bragging, they have "good taste".
People don't want to be well, they want to be better than others, and they'll seek to achieve that in the way that is easier and more convenient, which is vulgar display of power, since hitting people in the face usually leads to problems, that is now achieved through the purchase of excessively expensive items just to show you they can.
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Not quite. People don't get to choose work hours per week, but they can choose work hours per lifetime. I worked about 16,000 hours and retired.
So are you saying that a Walmart employee can choose to work for 7 years and then retire? Hardly believable.
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Consumer goods are practically free next to housing. I don’t buy this argument at all. I could completely slash or double marketing-driven spending tomorrow and be in substantially the same financial position. Maybe that’s just a Bay Area distortion. Consider also that a large portion of consumer goods spending is on cars, which are basically just a substitute for living on more central/expensive land. In the end it…
The real cost of housing is distorted though when house prices keep going up. In many cases, if you take into account the value increase of housing, it is actually opposite of what you claim. People don't spend anything on housing, because they get back whatever they put pay for the house in terms of value increase of the property. I think it would be more fair to look at, how much does it cost to build a house, and…
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> you can't function without [a phone > + plan once you're 13yo, and laptop]. > It's not really a discretionary > spending. Even if I give you that a network connected phone is something a teenager absolutely must have, that still leaves the fact that most people vastly overspend on these items. Yes you might need a smartphone and a laptop for school, but those are going to cost at most $200 used, but people conflate…
The only reason you and I can buy $200 used Thinkpads is because everyone else is clamoring to overspend for shiny new ones. If more people were OK with keeping their computers longer or buying used, then the price of used computers would go up. This would obviously be good because we would be valuing things closer to the actual benefit that they bring, but its not the case that we can ALL just have dirt-cheap few-ye…
In any case, I think, with respect, that you're postulating an absurd hypothetical scenario that's never going to happen. There's always going to be some people who buy new and others who buy used, think used cars, clothes etc.
Phones & laptops are now a mature technology, the days when you need a new computer to run spreadsheets or browse the Internet are over. Nowadays a 5 year old computer is just as good for pretty much any application except AAA games.
The GP was mentioning students as needing phones & laptops. I'm pointing out that students in particular think nothing of buying say used clothes because they don't have a lot of money, but for some reason a lot more people have expensive new gadgets they don't need.
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So are you saying that a Walmart employee can choose to work for 7 years and then retire? Hardly believable.
No, I'm saying I chose not to work for Walmart.
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Just a nitpick, but I think you are using the marginal tax numbers instead of the actual tax rate, and not applying all the complicated deductions available to US people. Texas: $95k pre-tax falls into the marginal 28% bracket, but after subtracting 401k + IRA deferral ($18k + $5.5k), $95k falls to AGI of $71.5k. Then after subtracting standard deduction ($6.35k for single 30y, no children), personal exemption ($4.05…
Hm, this is interesting to me -- if your example is representative, US income tax rates are often quoted at the marginal rate, whereas European taxes (higher on a percentage basis) are quoted at the net rate, skewing the perception in the direction of European taxes sounding lower than they really are. Of course, there's both deductions and non-income taxes also, which complicate the issue. In Norway, the total tax p…
It isn’t easy to compare apples to apples but generally I’d guess in Europe highly paid professions are subsidizing the poor relative to the US.
Saying that people just like working is ridiculous. It's either author's social bubble or it's straight propaganda. I cannot imagine people in factories or construction saying they like to go to work. The reasons behind the 40-hour week are way more brutal: - Contemporary economy has surprising amount of internal inefficiency causing most of the value to be wasted. - Value that is not squandered is distributed uneven…
This is the point “Efficiency Cult Capitalists” seem to miss. They think market forces will drive conpanies to be more efficient, but they don’t reliably do so except in the very long term (larger timescales than a typical human career length.)
As a startup your costs are high relative to your income and so you have an incentive to use labor efficiently (VC incentive warping aside.) The only way you can grow profits is by using labor to grow production or marketing.
But one you have an established share of the market, the equation reversed and you have lots of revenues and relatively smaller costs. In addition you have a new production-neutral way to create value: you can use labor to build a moat that will prevent competitors from springing up in your wake.
This decreases labor efficiency, because you’re doing more labor and not increasing production at all. But it creates value by stalling depreciation on your previous capital expensitures.
It’s not clear to me what incentives decide how much companies invest in production vs moat building. In the case of software companies I’ve seen it seems to be that moat maintenance is typically at least half of the labor. I have no idea how that gets established. I would be interested if anyone has ideas on how that balance gets struck.
Of course inefficiency is opportunity. And so high rollers can use a bunch of cash to crash over someone’s moat, and then compete with them on efficiency. However, the market incentive here is that once you are over the moat you just split the market. Both companies save the cost of actually investing resources in efficiency, the moat buster gets a return for their effort.
However, I do think there is another opportunity: if you can get over the moat, and then instead of trying to own the market yourself (at which point you are competing on level terms with the incumbent) if you can create a private market (like Lyft, AdWords, etc) then you invite a thousand smaller companies to compete on efficiency... this allows you to marshal a larger volume of management resources than a CEO could direct, which gives you an advantage against the incumbent. You will shrink the overall profit pool (due to increased efficiency) and you have to share that pool with your contractors, BUT you have a shot at taking the entire market, so that could be worth more than the cabal spoils you’d get coordinating with the incumbent.