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The Ponzi Career

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Re: The Ponzi Career

#61

Post by gedy »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #13

I enjoyed the piece. Personally, I want no part of it, but I think it might work well for people who are not me. I've always been "on my own." My life really is a series of watersheds, where I've been the only person to believe in me, before the event, and a whole bunch of folks seemed to believe in me, after the fact. Not a particularly good setup for selling "Chris-Tokens™." Not a bad thing, in the long run. It hur…

> I'm actually fairly good at what I do, but If I mention that, it comes across as "arrogant," despite the enormous ocean of hubris that pretty much defines today's tech scene.

That's really insightful as I've definitely noticed many people judge by looks and impression more than the content of what's said. Unattractive/awkward people are frequently treated as insufferable when they are correct.

Re: The Ponzi Career

#62

Post by nemo44x »

airza wrote: post #42
nemo44x wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is but you wonder if the instability of a career is even more horrifying? It is essentially like a farmer selling futures contracts on their crop. The yield of the crop and market conditions at harvest time are so uncertain that trading upside for stability becomes a smart bet. So one might think to themselves that they don’t feel certain about their ability to generate income for the next 20 years and sell a clai…

The entire line of thinking just seems to me like it is bending over backwards to avoid just... having income taxes and a social safety net.

I think it’s more like insurance than a social safety net. It’s also private instead of public and therefore by necessity, political, which is undesirable for many people.

And I don’t think it’s in lieu of a social safety net. This would exist to stabilize a lifestyle. A social safety net would still exist for adults that can’t take care of themselves through government funded shelter and food and other things.

I would expect a professional couple with plans of a family wouldn’t be able to (or want to) rely on the whims of government assistance. You’d maybe want to plan a lifestyle and getting up front money could have benefits. Similar to purchasing additional life insurance if you have kids.

Re: The Ponzi Career

#65

Post by ghaff »

gcheong wrote: post #39
sgt101 wrote: post #17

"Isn't this the same as traditional student debt or, worse, indentured servitude? Not really" Saying "not really" doesn't make something so. This is, literary indentured servitude. By definition.

By what definition? In the lambda school case you only pay back if you’re in a job that pays >50k/year, it’s a percentage of income, and it’s capped at 30k. Indentured servitude requires you to do basically anything for your indenture holder for no pay until you’ve paid it back. Student loans that cannot be discharged regardless of circumstance sounds far more like indentured servitude than an ISA to me so “not reall…

Yes. I'm not sure how making the payback variable as a function of salary up to some cap is something unacceptable while a fixed payment obligation is a run of the mill loan.

Re: The Ponzi Career

#66

Post by tjs8rj »

mattzito wrote: post #14

There’s literally nothing in this article that you couldn’t replace “token” or “coin” with “contract” or “membership” and have it work exactly the same. The idea of selling contracts against future income is interesting but putting the blockchain here is yet another solution in search of a problem.

I’m usually in total agreement about blockchain just being stuffed anywhere, but observationally, there must be a good reason why blockchain shows up in these situations so often. There’s definitely the hype factor, but blockchain does have value in that it’s reasonably trusted by average people (perhaps unlike signing a contract everytime you wanted to purchase a piece of a creator - coins gamify it), and it’s easy to setup trust systems - Alex setup his own token in a weekend for a “human IPO”, rather than running through the cost and time of properly setting it up with a lawyer and contracts.

Maybe blockchain’s biggest value proposition right now is that it’s lightly regulated and has hype, so using it greases the wheels when growing an audience or building a usually regulated product.

Re: The Ponzi Career

#67

Post by mooreds »

mattzito wrote: post #14

There’s literally nothing in this article that you couldn’t replace “token” or “coin” with “contract” or “membership” and have it work exactly the same. The idea of selling contracts against future income is interesting but putting the blockchain here is yet another solution in search of a problem.

I get the point of the shocking title.

But what he describes, hedging risk, is not a new concept. It is something that people do every day when they diversify investments or buy insurance. ISAs and "person as tokens" just push this to new levels.

> In such a scenario, every career becomes a pyramid scheme.

In other words, the rich get richer--scalability works.

One thing the author left out (or that I missed) is that scalability increases overall wealth. If I have to learn calculus from an average teacher because of geographic limitations, and then my child gets to learn from the best calculus teacher in the world, in the latter case the world gets richer because the same knowledge is arrived at quicker at less expense. (Of course, there's fallout for the average worker, but this is something we've been dealing with in the developed world for decades and still haven't figured out.)

Re: The Ponzi Career

#68

Post by dasil003 »

llaolleh wrote: post #38
kingsuper20 wrote: post #21

I've run into that with doctors now and again. You'll meet a younger doctor who complains heavily about student debt and how impossible life in the US is. I'll offer to write a check for the debt in return for a negotiated percentage of their income from now on. Silence ensues.

Haha I love this. If we think about it in terms of pure game play, medicine is a part of the game where the strategy is to take on a massive amount of debt, high risk and uncertainty for incredible returns.

I'm not sure I like the investment analogy for ones career since you have to actually put the work in to get the pay. Your time, effort and talent are at least as much of a contributor as the medical school tuition. Perhaps a name brand school gives you a significant bump in earning potential on the margins but "incredible returns" still feels reductive of what is essentially a very hard and traditional career path.

Re: The Ponzi Career

#69

Post by 0x4d464d48 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #36
kingsuper20 wrote: post #21

I've run into that with doctors now and again. You'll meet a younger doctor who complains heavily about student debt and how impossible life in the US is. I'll offer to write a check for the debt in return for a negotiated percentage of their income from now on. Silence ensues.

> I'll offer to write a check for the debt in return for a negotiated percentage of their income from now on. Silence ensues. Writing someone a check in exchange for their future earnings "from now on" is a terrible deal. You're essentially offering a loan that can never be paid back, yet requires payments forever . Loans are a good deal because the terms are known ahead of time, payments end when the principle is pa…

"You're essentially offering a loan that can never be paid back, yet requires payments forever."

A better analogy would be taking part ownership of a man's livelihood and expecting him to pay dividends like a stock.

If he tied his career to an LLC this would make sense oterwise he's literally selling himself.

Re: The Ponzi Career

#70

Post by adkadskhj »

musingsole wrote: post #59
lisper wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't have the personal skills to "sell" myself Actually you do. You've demonstrated them in this very comment. Maybe you don't realize this, or maybe your self-deprecation is a deliberate part of your strategy. Either way, it worked on me. This comment led me to your profile, which led me to your company web sites, which impressed me. I don't need an iOS app developer at the moment, but if I did you'd be at the…

To reiterate, it is very likely that those people who passed on you or didn't become interested due to the lack of self-marketing are not the people you would want to work with and doubly are not actually offering the job you thought you were applying for. Grifters interview and hire grifters because their org/team/company relies on the grift more than the truth to make ends meet. If you can't grift, you frankly don'…

My fear with this mindset of "They're people i wouldn't want to work with anyway" is that it's easy to say that when i'm not hungry.

If my mortgage is on the line my desire for a paycheck increases. Perhaps i don't live simply enough - but i'm always concerned about stability and until i'm retired i will always be concerned about the next paycheck. I too lack skills to feel confident about common interviews, but i look at this as a fault. If i felt more confident about interviews perhaps i'd feel more confident about my stability.

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