

Ask HN: Do you feel vulnerable because your product is not physical? - quizbiz

Worst comes to worst, General Motors, now going into bankruptcy, can sell off its factories, its inventories, its infrastructure for billions.<p>But what do we as web developers, hackers, programers, have? How much is what we make worth without an internet connection? This gets me wondered how, if one wanted to, would go about insuring a website or web app. How would it be valued?<p>Am I the only one that feels vulnerable because of this? Is there a solution?<p>Hearing about Obama stepping up "efforts to secure the internet" (The Economist) got me thinking about this.
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SwellJoe
It never crossed my mind to worry. But, then again, I've been in situations
where my company (a previous one) wasn't making any money for a quite long
period of time, and I had to improvise. It all turned out fine, in the sense
that I never experienced foreclosure on the house, the power and phone and gas
companies only _threatened_ to turn them off, and the cash advance on the
credit card covered the next couple of months worth of payments. I'm pretty
easy going about that sort of thing, and I think it's served me well.

Just make sure you always have health insurance (this one isn't optional), and
be prepared to tighten your belt a lot at the first signs of actual trouble.

It might help for you to make a plan for belt-tightening so you know how
little you can actually live on. Things you could plan to do and factor into
your new lean budget: Sell your car (assuming it isn't bringing in revenue due
to doing contract work on-site or something), turn off the cable TV and mobile
(again assuming you don't need a phone to make money), cancel all
subscriptions to everything, eat cheaply (dry beans, rice, whatever vegetables
are on special; about $1.50 per meal easy to achieve), and if you look at
those numbers and are still worried, then your house or apartment is too
big/expensive for you and you should downsize _before_ trouble hits. You also
want to make sure your credit cards are paid down while things are going OK.

And, of course, fearmongers are just that, and don't usually need to be taken
too seriously. The Internet is pretty robust, in general, and important enough
to the rest of the nations economy that even if things really went to hell,
the biggest corporations in the world would spend billions or trillions to
bring it back quickly. It's just too tightly integrated into everything now.
You're not some outlier in building your business on the web... _everybody_ is
depending on the Internet. We're all in this together.

