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Maybe we're in a bubble but it doesn't matter

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Re: Maybe we're in a bubble but it doesn't matter

#51

Post by carguy1983 »

rabidsnail wrote: post #35
conover wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accounting and practicing law is a waste?

Have you ever met an accountant that gets up in the morning excited to get to accoutning? Have you ever heard someone say: "Today is my lucky day! I get to go see my accountant!"? I'm not saying they're not necessary. But if the economy were a mechanical system, law and accounting would be the friction between the belts and the wheels that produces waste heat.

I wouldn't call it waste. I would call it overhead, which is very different than waste.

Re: Maybe we're in a bubble but it doesn't matter

#52

Post by iandanforth »

ubasu wrote: post #41
olalonde wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a big fan of protecting people from themselves. Who are you to tell me I shouldn't be allowed to invest in a startup because I'm too dumb to make that decision for myself? Whether or not you are right about the bubble is besides the point.

It's called information asymmetry. As an individual, you do not have the power to get all the necessary information to make a sound decision, but working through the government - which in a democracy ideally represents you and others like you - you can get that information.

This is an important point. You could provide a valuable service to the new angel class by running a site that provides startups with easy to fill out forms that translate into useful, actionable, understandable explanations of their new businesses.

I'm sure the standard brokers will provide guidance like this for a price, but you could establish norms as to what information is most important for every single new company to get out there, or take standards set by the government and make that information accessible.

Re: Maybe we're in a bubble but it doesn't matter

#53

Post by pessimizer »

olalonde wrote: post #37
socialist_coder wrote: post #28

Justin is fundamentally missing what people are saying the bubble is. From my perspective, no one is arguing that high tech and programming won't be more and more important in the future. "Anyone who tells you that you shouldn’t be in tech, or that the current market situation will create an oversupply of people in tech, is doing you a massive disservice." Who is saying this? I don't think anyone is trying to dissuad…

I'm not a big fan of protecting people from themselves. Who are you to tell me I shouldn't be allowed to invest in a startup because I'm too dumb to make that decision for myself? Whether or not you are right about the bubble is besides the point.

It's not themselves they should be protected from, but the people who are going to try to sucker them.

Now if you lay out all of the facts in front of the mark, and he/she dismisses them as pessimism or a conspiracy - I'd say society's responsibility should end there. But I think that the less credulous people in a society should institute enough oversight over situations that could be potential scams so that the more credulous can have the best picture of the situation that a neutral party could provide.

Statistically, a large amount of people will always be too dumb to make that decision for themselves, so we should try to ply them with all of the supplementary smarts that it's pragmatically possible to muster:)

Re: Maybe we're in a bubble but it doesn't matter

#54

Post by megrimlock »

rabidsnail wrote: post #35
conover wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accounting and practicing law is a waste?

Have you ever met an accountant that gets up in the morning excited to get to accoutning? Have you ever heard someone say: "Today is my lucky day! I get to go see my accountant!"? I'm not saying they're not necessary. But if the economy were a mechanical system, law and accounting would be the friction between the belts and the wheels that produces waste heat.

This may sound crazy, but there are people drawn to accounting or insurance who are simply numerate, who love numbers and precision and carefully designing rules that accomodate the fascinating special cases of the real world, and who do enjoy that kind of work. It sounds dreary and gray, and we like to scoff at it as bean-counting, but it does appeal to a certain detail-oriented mindset that isn't all that far off from some forms of engineering.

Here's another view: Accounting is the instrumentation that lets you make sure the machine (the business) stays calibrated, and that the inputs match up to the outputs.

Re: Maybe we're in a bubble but it doesn't matter

#55

Post by jboggan »

moistgorilla wrote: post #36
olalonde wrote: post #29

On the other hand, there might come a time where software becomes so important and pervasive that it won't make sense anymore to call yourself a software engineer or a software company. I'm guessing there was once a time where the next big thing was to become a mathematician. However, mathematics has grown so central to so many fields that very few people nowadays call themselves mathematicians or dream of building m…

I completely agree with this post, soon people are going to open their eyes and programming will be taught from elementary school to high school. Not being able to program will be equivalent to what being illiterate was.

I agree with this, but I think we're closer to Pharaonic Egypt than the Enlightenment in terms of code literacy. We're going to be the scribes for a long, long time.

Re: Maybe we're in a bubble but it doesn't matter

#56

Post by Drbble »

socialist_coder wrote: post #28

Justin is fundamentally missing what people are saying the bubble is. From my perspective, no one is arguing that high tech and programming won't be more and more important in the future. "Anyone who tells you that you shouldn’t be in tech, or that the current market situation will create an oversupply of people in tech, is doing you a massive disservice." Who is saying this? I don't think anyone is trying to dissuad…

The mortgage bubble was a great time to sell a house. The dotcom bubble is a great time to sell tech (companies or your labor). Just be wary of what you buy. I am bubbling all the way to the bank.

Re: Maybe we're in a bubble but it doesn't matter

#57

Post by emmelaich »

scarmig wrote: post #39
olalonde wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a big fan of protecting people from themselves. Who are you to tell me I shouldn't be allowed to invest in a startup because I'm too dumb to make that decision for myself? Whether or not you are right about the bubble is besides the point.

Well, aside from well-meaning paternalism... everyone who overextended themselves with a too-large mortgage did it of their own free will and hypothetically were only screwing themselves. But when things go to shit, the effects of a large number of people screwing themselves spill over to a bunch of complete innocents (well, people who are innocent of everything except existing in our contemporary economy).

I suspect that the reason that a large number of people screwed themselves over is because sometime in the past some smaller subset was protected from slightly screwing themselves over.

Re: Maybe we're in a bubble but it doesn't matter

#58

Post by MaysonL »

olalonde wrote: post #42
scarmig wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, aside from well-meaning paternalism... everyone who overextended themselves with a too-large mortgage did it of their own free will and hypothetically were only screwing themselves. But when things go to shit, the effects of a large number of people screwing themselves spill over to a bunch of complete innocents (well, people who are innocent of everything except existing in our contemporary economy).

I agree with your observation but I still disagree with the conclusion that we should protect people from themselves for the simple reason that people do not have a responsibility towards the economy . If half Silicon Valley stops going to work tomorrow, the economy will unquestionably take a massive hit. Should we have a law preventing people from stopping going to work? If Zuckerberg decided not to build Facebook,…

I think we would all be better off if the Comptroller of the Currency, the Office of Thrift Supervision, the FDIC, and the Fed had been much stricter in keeping banks and others from making liars' loans.

Re: Maybe we're in a bubble but it doesn't matter

#59

Post by MaysonL »

rpeden wrote: post #19

When I read things like this, I have to wonder if the people saying it are really naive or sheltered enough to believe it: "You want to be in the tech game, because in time it will be the only game in town." Well, no...because tech won't be big enough to employ more than a relatively small percentage of the population. And it won't matter that companies want to pay tech workers to help automate people out of jobs. Be…

Mechanical Turk will have an endless supply of two-bit tasks...

Re: Maybe we're in a bubble but it doesn't matter

#60

Post by justin »

rscale wrote: post #26
rpeden wrote: post #19

When I read things like this, I have to wonder if the people saying it are really naive or sheltered enough to believe it: "You want to be in the tech game, because in time it will be the only game in town." Well, no...because tech won't be big enough to employ more than a relatively small percentage of the population. And it won't matter that companies want to pay tech workers to help automate people out of jobs. Be…

It's an especially odd statement coming from the founder of a company that employs people to run errands for other people.

I guess my point was that I'd rather be the guy making the software that directs people around running errands then one of the guys running errands. To that end, I needed to have software engineering and product skills (otherwise I wouldn't have had the opportunity to even be in the position to start this company).

To the grandfather's point, I might be naive but when we automate away large numbers of people's jobs of course we will have to figure out some sort of wealth redistribution to give those people spending power (we do this right now in social welfare). However, my bet is that if you are one of the people doing the automating you'll be a lot better off than one of the people on welfare, because we've never in the history of humankind had perfect wealth redistribution.

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