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How much money we can raise for transparently idiotic startups?

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Re: How much money we can raise for transparently idiotic startups?

#51
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know what startup you are mocking, but this is a very bad faith way to characterize building ADUs cheaply. You don’t know the first thing about housing, besides making drama about it.

Multi-family units and rezoning single family plots is great. Trying to get poor people to live in the back yard like a family pet is a humiliating proposition.

Poor people are not children or animals. You can allow for them to just choose not to live in the backyard. For the right price I might have gladly done this.

But this is the great debate of our generation, I suppose. Are people capable of making choices or not?

Re: How much money we can raise for transparently idiotic startups?

#52
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> startup world is just a massive pump and dump scheme, and so it moves from field to field finding the next hotness But we retain the solutions that work. A slime mold tries a bunch of useless paths in a maze before it finds the right one. Then it trims and reinforces. Most start-ups failing isn't a sure sign of wasted work.

You can save minutes of talking to folks through Months of work and tens of thousands of people-hours building something people don't want or need. You can save months of research by spending years of work and hundreds of thousands of people-hours building something that doesn't work.

> You can save minutes of talking to folks

You're describing focus groups. They have a mixed history in product development.

Re: How much money we can raise for transparently idiotic startups?

#54
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> startup world is just a massive pump and dump scheme, and so it moves from field to field finding the next hotness But we retain the solutions that work. A slime mold tries a bunch of useless paths in a maze before it finds the right one. Then it trims and reinforces. Most start-ups failing isn't a sure sign of wasted work.

What startups have provided lasting real solutions and value, not just capitalistic, in say the last decade?

WhatsApp

Re: How much money we can raise for transparently idiotic startups?

#55
SMBC is a treasure, just like XKCD. Zach's and Kelly's books are quite nicely, some like Soonish are just good accessible futurism/science reading, their comic collections are excellent, and they aren't afraid to offend. For example, I was part of their initial Kickstarter for The Holy Bible: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness https://hivemill.com/products/pocket-bible and now I have a much-easier-to-get-through-and-considerably-more-fun Bible with Zach's signature. It has provided for much silliness at many parties in my house. I don't rotate in baptist/fundamentalist circles though, those would probably be aghast at it.

Re: How much money we can raise for transparently idiotic startups?

#57
post #21

It's not just AI startups. It's almost all of them. The startup world is just a massive pump and dump scheme, and so it moves from field to field finding the next hotness. Self-driving cars, VR, EVs, AI, and so on. People soon realize that you can't just take a bunch of hipster tech employees and suddenly create non-solutions that need to have problems created for them to even be solutions, much less choosing extreme…

This is simply not true. Most startup founders are genuinely trying to build something that has value to the economy, and therefore society. Most fail early, most of what's left fails later, but some go on to be real, profitable, businesses.

That's how it works outside of the startup world too. Most restaurants, clothing stores, car repair shops, etc. go out of business after just a few years, while a few move on to become large chains and the like.

Re: How much money we can raise for transparently idiotic startups?

#58
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know what startup you are mocking, but this is a very bad faith way to characterize building ADUs cheaply. You don’t know the first thing about housing, besides making drama about it.

Multi-family units and rezoning single family plots is great. Trying to get poor people to live in the back yard like a family pet is a humiliating proposition.

> Trying to get poor people to live in the back yard like a family pet is a humiliating proposition

I would have loved to have had this option in college. Glad my landlord saved me from humiliation! (And let us be honest, for every useful idiot who thinks they're helping the poor by constraining their options there are ten homeowners who don't want poor people in their neighbourhood.)

Re: How much money we can raise for transparently idiotic startups?

#59
post #21

It's not just AI startups. It's almost all of them. The startup world is just a massive pump and dump scheme, and so it moves from field to field finding the next hotness. Self-driving cars, VR, EVs, AI, and so on. People soon realize that you can't just take a bunch of hipster tech employees and suddenly create non-solutions that need to have problems created for them to even be solutions, much less choosing extreme…

Nothing proved the emperor has no clothes better than the crypto trend.

Re: How much money we can raise for transparently idiotic startups?

#60

The important thing to understand here is that you shouldn't write on a latex balloon with a Sharpie. It works well for a while, but when the balloon inevitably pops or deflates, the Sharpie ink will re-liquify and get all over the place. Then you will learn the meaning of the phrase "indelible on porous surfaces".

I lost a couch to this.
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