831–840 of 957 posts
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No, starting a business takes capital. You can build a Django website from your basement for free, but to turn it into a profitable business takes cash.
Freelance programming doesn't require any more capital than owning a computer. Anyone can start by contributing to open source projects.
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> I don't see a feedback loop that makes it hard to escape poverty Really? You’re 16 years old, you’ve a high IQ and a passion for programming. Your parents are alcoholics. You don’t have nice clothes. You don’t have perfect manners because it’s just not the world you live in. How do you get to the university admissions interview in the next town? How will you compete against the mannerly, well turned out student wit…
Bill Gates has openly admitted how much his environment helped. Being genetically gifted as he is is only part of the equation. He also grew up in an affluent enough area to have early to computers as well as the time and supportive environment to pursue it. I wonder if people who claim environment doesnt matter have spent any appreciable time in poor neighborhoods. The absolute best will usually find their way out.…
Not to mention the role his familial connections had in his landing that sweetheart deal with IBM.
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If you were familiar with the data, you wouldn't make statements like that, because heritability is a population statistic, not a constant. It varies significantly between populations, to the point where you can't make claims about it without controlling for the population you're studying. For instance, we could say that the heritability of intelligence among the children of suburban Chicago families in a particular…
If you were familiar with the data, you wouldn't make statements like that, because heritability of intelligence is largely the same across all population studied so far, and universally high. There are exceptions, e.g. Scarr-Rowe effect is most likely real, but it only seems to work on very low end of SES range, which is virtually unseen in today's America, even at the lowest end of what counts as poverty.
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If you were familiar with the data, you wouldn't make statements like that, because heritability of intelligence is largely the same across all population studied so far, and universally high. There are exceptions, e.g. Scarr-Rowe effect is most likely real, but it only seems to work on very low end of SES range, which is virtually unseen in today's America, even at the lowest end of what counts as poverty.
Scarr's original twin study was done in Philadelphia. Seems strange to discount the Scarr-Rowe effect as not existing in the US at all when it was originally found there in the first place.
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> So do most batters in Major League Baseball. VC is the batter, though. They're interviewing people to be their balls.
And some balls get hit so hard that they become successful Baseball players themselves?
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I'm using a generalization of the mechanics definition of "leverage" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lever ). A mechanism by which a small input can result in a larger output.
OK. By that definition leverage is a wonderful thing everyone should use!
Sure. But even setting aside whether the ability to use it is evenly distributed, the availability of resources to be leveraged definitely isn't, so the rich get richer even with relatively passive strategies.
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It does? A $5/mo droplet can serve a good amount of traffic. And there are lots of free ways to get some initial users, they just take time. I know because I’ve done exactly that. This kind of can’t-do attitude really saddens me. I see it all the time in these discussions about wealth inequality.
I know. I've set up websites before; I am aware that it doesn't take that much money to get it running. But what about advertising? Branding? Anything that a $5 droplet can do, someone else's product can probably do too -- you don't have the tech advantage. Do you stand out with UX? By doing the legwork yourself? All of these take manpower, and that means capital. It's not the website that costs money to make; it's m…
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> Most startups fail, though. So do most batters in Major League Baseball.
> So do most batters in Major League Baseball. VC is the batter, though. They're interviewing people to be their balls.
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I think Paul is fundamentally not understanding the argument behind “billionaires exploit workers.” It isn’t that billionaires are fundamentally bad people or that they’ve accumulated their wealth through misdeeds. But what it is is that it’s basically impossible to accumulate that amount of wealth through work. Instead, you have to be able to capture the difference between the value of someone else’s work and what y…
This is basically the labour theory of value and ignores the value of capital and organisation. Some guy delivering stuff in a garage is not going to be nowhere near as productive as an Amazon worker. The crucial bit that people miss is that it is capital, goodwill and organisation allows employees to generate so much money in the first place. Basically the sum is greater than its parts. If you want to know where pro…
You're ignoring the fact that capital has most of the systemic advantages such as various information asymmetries, and thus reaps most of the rewards.
Capital also exerts quite a lot of influence to ensure that labor markets don't get too tight (eg. economic policies that target unemployment rates that aren't "too low") that might somewhat counter capital's negotiating advantage.
And when that still isn't enough of an advantage, colluding to limit the mobility of labor among competitors is absolutely on the table, because even if caught the consequences aren't particularly severe.