How are they good? They literally helped my competitors to out-compete me using free money from a money printer. I had to work hard for my money to buy stuff from the same markets; whose prices they drove up using free money.
If you factor out ignorance, it's as evil as it gets.
And yes, if you're living paycheck-to-paycheck, you are competing in the market against homeless people for limited goods. That's the modern reality. Most people are precariously close to being homeless.
If the rich started donating a lot of money to all the homeless people, I'd probably become homeless myself because rents for low-cost accommodation would go up because of all the free money flooding that market...
Then surprise, surprise, when it'd be my turn to get my free money, rich people wouldn't have any money left to spare for me because the problem would have become too large by then due to perverse incentives they would have created.
The whole system is in a controlled demolition; concentrating more and more and creating increasingly perverse incentives. Why bother creating value, when there is an easier way to get money by convincing rich people to 'select' you?
There have always been poor people, but those poor people keep getting richer when compared with each other across time. Better to be working poor now than a king in the middle ages (in terms of access to information, health outcomes, food quality, healthspan, lifespan, etc., etc., etc.).
Yet when some claim the public sector is corrupt, filled with looters and should therefore be cut, the opposition demands that the public sector should be expanded instead.
But they are already rich, so the only thing they've been concentrating on is wealth preservation of their own class. To what consequences is quite nicely laid out by the blog post by Jeff.
That would still require what GP is suggesting, no?
1%'ers don't have to worry about the price of groceries nor affordable housing; they can just brute-force whatever they desire through excessive wealth.
At least, that's the impression I get from the millionaires I know. Perhaps not all are like this (they gathered their wealth primarily via private equity) but I have no reason to think politicians would be any different.
My thinking has been that society only pays attention to the mechanisms that favour upward movement while completely neglecting how to push down - from the top.
Maybe because of naive concepts like "enlarging the cake for everyone" or - more likely - the top won't allow the protections they raised to be lowered.
If everyone’s slices get enlarged in proportion, the naive assumption, then it works as expected. If some people are clever enough to direct the enlargement towards their slices, then it doesn’t.
You can start and business and get downwards social mobility (lose your personal investment in a bussiness which fails).
And inversely, you can get upwards mobility without starting a business (like with a promotion or getting a better job). Or rather, in the last decades, increasingly you can't. But traditionally, that was the way most people saw it. The "company man" going through the ranks, the immigrant who studies and gets a good job, etc. Building a business was always a thing for a minority.
And since most new businesses fail anyway (and in most fields require capital, not to mention connections and lack, plus a specific set of skills like salesmanship and market savvy), "start a business" as a solution to social mobility at large, is a really bad idea.
Starting a succesful business doesn't even necessarily translate to social mobility for others. In fact, it can happen even in a social mobility wise regressing economy. E.g. many people lose better paying jobs, and end up working on the cheap for some uber (pun intended) successful new business.
????? What does any of what you wrote have to do with social mobility statistics? They don’t measure number of businesses or opera attendance when determining movement from bottom quintile of income to top quintile.
>Successful business people start multiple businesses.
Which is irrelevant to the points discussed, no?
Nobody claimed successful business people don't start multiple businesses.
>Social class and economic class are different. Few successful welders go to the opera
Social mobility in the context of this discussion is about getting better jobs and making more money. It's not about becoming an aristocrat or going to the Opera...
>America is the best country in the world for growing something new
The 27th best, if that new thing is supposed to lift your social/economic status upwards: "The US ranked 27th in the 2020 Global Social Mobility Index".
But it might well be the best for people to build new businesses of scale (especially already well off people).
That's because making it easy to start your own company will only provide upwards mobility to <1% of the population.
My grandpa worked in agriculture, my dad in a factory, and I'm a software engineer. The only reason I became the first in my family to go to university is that in my country as long as I passed all my classes I was pretty much guaranteed to not pay a euro for attending university. I even went to one of the top 5 universities for CS in Spain, which might be crap compared to US ones, but economically I'm much better off than my parents.
Affordable university education can provide upwards mobility to a lot more people.
In most of the US, as long as you are sufficiently academically qualified, you can go to a public university for free or nearly so. The exact standards vary by state, but they are not all that rigorous. The federal government on top of this provides means-tested grants to anyone regardless of academic qualifications that for poor people is likely to amount to 50-75% of public university or 100% of a two-year college.
Where the US differs from a lot of European countries is a) a lot of people chase after their "dream" university, which may be private/more selective/out of state/etc and b) almost anyone can go to A university in the US, no matter how poor their grades. It just won't be free.
From Oz to the US knocks 5 years off life expectancy, knocks a whole 1 point (out of 10) from your democracy index, reduces your human freedom rating, increases your health care spending, increases your 10 year cost of living, etc.
Gource is very useful getting up-to-speed on a new project. It gives you a quick visual history of the project and usually makes it clear where the problem spots are: the places with the most laser fire are the fire fights.
I had my password manager compromised by a business partner. I added him to my 1Password account and then, in a play for control of the company, he attempted to remove me. Lesson learned: don't try to save money on password managers.
If all of my 2FA code generators had been in 1Password I would have been truly screwed, but in a stroke of luck I had been paranoid enough to use a separate app for 2FA codes.
Wild! Would that actually work in the long run? It could cause you a lot of trouble, I’m sure, but it seems like if you have any legal documentation, a lawyer would easily fix it. And it seems like it’s probably illegal to try to remove someone without consent or authorization, so it could potentially backfire pretty hard for him?
I know this happens sometimes, and I’m thankful my partnerships have never gone this bad. Did you know it was headed this direction before he tried it? Was that the end of the company?
The law is amazingly difficult to actually enforce against someone who simply will not comply. If everything goes to a potential finding of contempt it takes ages to win by inches. This is what I ended up doing. Literally took 2+ years.
I “won” in the end — the board fired him and appointed me CEO - but it destroyed the company.
And yes, I saw it coming, but was hoping I could control him until we found revenue and the pressure came off. This was illogical because people like that cannot find revenue.
I'm sorry this happened to you, but it highlights another very important factor. Don't keep all keys to the kingdom on one person. Always divide and conquer. Keep power distributed between multiple people. I worked at a company of 500+ people, and I'm sure the CEO didn't have access to all the IT people's stuff. They only cared that everything works and meet their quarterly goals. Shall the IT person feel like sabotaging stuff, there are distributed backups and mainly the fine print in the work contract preventing that.
I know this doesn't necessarily apply to smaller companies and startups, but have lawyers write you strong contracts that aren't one-sided, but are full of protections for both sides, if they aren't sabotaging stuff.
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