61–70 of 105 posts
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Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes. Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
After the number of times I’ve seen people invoke the HN guidelines to trample good spirited discussions there should be a guideline against quoting the guidelines.
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The vast majority of startups lose money for their founders. So if that happens the founders should have been paid? The workers were the exploiters? I've hired people first hand for projects that ended up being a flop. They made out much better than I did Someone has to take the risk. It's not guaranteed it'll be a risk with a positive expected value either
The entire reason someone takes the risk is for the chance to have a ‘positive’ expected value, which in startup land means the company gets really big, hires a lot of people, and makes a lot of money for the owners (founders & investors) by selling a product for more money than they pay the workers. Startup investors often treat this like an odds game, expecting that while 9 out of 10 investments might fail, one of…
Yeah, it's not free profit though. If you're not good at choosing investments you end up with 9 out of 10 failing, and 1 only making 2x. That's what I mean by there are no guarantees of it
It's very easy to look at an isolated case where they made 10x and see it as unfair.. and miss the 9 other shots they took which lost money. Or hell the 90 other shots, and they're still in the hole overall
> When evaluating parent’s argument, don’t forget to think about companies like Walmart, Amazon, Exxon, and Disney.
Yeah these are definitely a different ballgame. Not sure where I stand on it - I don't know enough about the economics of that
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The vast majority of startups lose money for their founders. So if that happens the founders should have been paid? The workers were the exploiters? I've hired people first hand for projects that ended up being a flop. They made out much better than I did Someone has to take the risk. It's not guaranteed it'll be a risk with a positive expected value either
You know that if an employee works at a start up that goes under, they also face risk right? Like you're aware that people get laid off and fired?
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The entire reason someone takes the risk is for the chance to have a ‘positive’ expected value, which in startup land means the company gets really big, hires a lot of people, and makes a lot of money for the owners (founders & investors) by selling a product for more money than they pay the workers. Startup investors often treat this like an odds game, expecting that while 9 out of 10 investments might fail, one of…
> Startup investors often treat this like an odds game Yeah, it's not free profit though. If you're not good at choosing investments you end up with 9 out of 10 failing, and 1 only making 2x. That's what I mean by there are no guarantees of it It's very easy to look at an isolated case where they made 10x and see it as unfair.. and miss the 9 other shots they took which lost money. Or hell the 90 other shots, and the…
> It’s very easy to look at an isolated case where they made 10x and see it as unfair
“Unfair” is subjective and an insanely deep topic we can’t even begin broach here thoughtfully. It’s always true that a profitable company has incomes that exceed its costs, by definition. Since costs include employee pay, it’s always true in a profitable company that employees are collectively providing a greater value to the company than they are capturing for themselves. You’re still arguing from a failed startup perspective, and by and large, failing and failed startups are not running the economy, nor are even a significant portion. The majority of people in the economy are working for someone else’s profitable company. People who have money do take risks on startups for the chance make it big, but those people had money to begin with.
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The government part is a good point, this is not the best example of a capitalist endeavor. > What capital is there to own? The rights you mentioned is part of the ‘capital’ - these days capital and ‘means of production’ certainly involve intellectual property. I think it always did - capital was always referring to ownership - but the mix is starting to lean heavily on intangibles now, with software running so much…
I didn’t mean capital in the accounting sense, I meant receiving capital as remuneration as opposed to a salary. The more accurate word would have been equity, but I was using the term polotics used: >it was about capital ownership granting full access to work-created value.
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Would be cool if there was a middle ground between risking destitution by claiming a share of the income made and giving up your fair share of the billions made in return of a modest salary.
There is! You can negotiate a lower salary and higher participation. Obviously they have to want you, but when a show like this is starting up and not at all sure to even make it one season, an art director who would work for 25% pay and 1% of future profits would be snapped up.
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Exploitation? Thousands of people are getting paid $90k to paint pointless characters nobody will ever see. It's not exploitation because one of them succeeds.
It's a technical term. She produced immense value and she didn't receive it, someone else took it. That's exploitation in Marxism. I also don't get where you get these idea that there's this huge glut of artists producing work that's unpopular and getting paid for it . If you're at the point you're getting paid 90k a year, you're working in studios that almost certainly turn a profit.
I now avoid jobs that pressure everyone into thinking a good show or project can only be created at the expense of everyone’s well being. Even if the IP they’re offering you a chance to work on is exciting (and unfortunately I’ve seen way too many times now how this can be used as a bargaining chip to mistreat people). It doesn’t have to be that way. You can make something great without killing your crew. hear hear.
Was this in the article somewhere? I searched and didn’t see it (and I’m most interested in why she left, and haven’t found anything on it.)
Wow the money shot of this I think is the quote: "...Or at least have a bit more financial security to show for it. My designs have generated roughly 2 billion dollars for the people lucky enough to be cashing in on it. Not bad surplus value for someone on an 88k salary.""" 88k AUD is less than 60'000 USD, and as this art director worked one year on this, the raw ratio of wage earned to this is 0.00003, so 0.003 perc…
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After the number of times I’ve seen people invoke the HN guidelines to trample good spirited discussions there should be a guideline against quoting the guidelines.
If anyone's entitled to quote the guidelines, it's the mod you're replying to.