Whether Academia is full of shit is irrelevant to the validity of mathematics. That being said, the GP comment basically demonstrates a peculiar cognitive bias. A variation of a logical fallacy: "I'm not dumb, therefore I never do dumb things." Of which we see all too often grafted into politics: Viz: Science is objective, therefore my (self-interested political) viewpoints are also objective, infallible, and inevitably correct.
It may not scale, but the chances of it making (any/more) money are much higher ("riches are in the niches") than a "fast startup" as it's very rare for a startup to grow fast and monetize quickly at the same time, because most people just won't buy immediately, sometimes even if it solves a problem for them.
That is the exact point of the essay. An average niche business makes more money than an average startup, but a successful startup makes many orders of magnitude more money than a successful niche business.
You might mean: a median niche business makes more money than a median startup.
Average is much higher than a median for startups because it includes the most successful startups which are by definition have a high growth rate over an extended period of time so they are very big.
Niche businesses in this context have a low growth so their average is closer to the median. The growth is constrained at the top in absolute terms (otherwise it would be a startup) so the average is lower than the one for startups.
Why would you try to implement this with WebRTC? WebRTC is for real time communication. It's in the name. Social networks don't have to be real time. How would you do persistence in a WebRTC-run social network? E.g. how can I visit your profile when you're offline?
WebRTC is about direct peer-to-peer connections between web browsers. The real-time stuff refers to the video/audio codecs that come as part of the spec.
Persistence is handled by storing-and-forwarding your profile information to your friends. Privacy is ensured by broadcast encryption. If you want people unconnected to your network to find you, you could publish public profile information on a directory server (this could also be the status server that's needed for bootstrapping a connection if you're logging in from a public computer at the library or wherever).
If you comment was not in jest, can you elaborate on why you think so? One can argue that all scientific theories are motivated to a larger or lesser extent by the prevalent world view of their day. But arguing, e.g. the Standard Model in physics is influenced by the politics of its day (~70s) is indeed bizarre.
This is the only true way a boss-less organization can work. And I assume you mean voting equity. Vesting requirements would be OK, but stuff like options or Google's non-voting shares wouldn't be.
Soviets were designed as self-governing co-ops - which is similar incentives to a startup with widely held equity right? It's not fully the same of course, but the views aren't so different in their aims.
The closest parallel to an equity structure would probably be to the employee-owned cooperative firms that exist in some jurisdictions. A crucial difference from startups is that equity is not tradable, not available to non-working investors, and cannot be taken with you if you leave the firm. Rather than owning securitized shares, you definitionally are entitled to a share of profits while working at the company; and everyone is entitled to the same share. So, for example, if there are 10,000 employees, you have a 1/10,000 claim on any dividends. If you leave the company, you no longer own shares. And there is no way to buy shares; cooperatives will generally only accept investment on bond or loan-like terms, not equity terms.
Sure, it's not as flexible, especially the totalitarian systems, though co-ops aren't as simply structured in their mature forms.
Look up "Mondragon" for what a modern form of distributist co-ops look like. Not the same share of profits, equity investment is the rule (limited to workers or co-op friendly orgs), and there are many other interesting aspects.
Well written, but I completely disagree. Behind your reasoning lies the classic libertarian argument about epistemological complexity (not saying you are a libertarian, just that you are using Austrian school reasoning): because we can't know what can potentially save lives, we should just let people do their thing without making any judgments on what should be our collective priorities. I, for one, have no doubt that a doctor saves more lives than a car mechanic. There are a lot of outcomes we can know, be certain about, do something about. If we concentrated as a society on defeating aging, for example, we would perhaps get rid of jobs that could very indirectly help in increasing our longevity, but we would replace them with jobs that do so much more directly and effectively.
You also completely misinterpret Maslow's hierarchy. It's not a prescriptive, but a descriptive one. An individual who has to struggle daily to survive usually does not have time for poetry.
There's always work to do exactly because there are always people looking for work. It's not the other way around. Most jobs aren't necessary for our survival, so people who don't want to work shouldn't be forced to work.
It's not Utopian horseshit. Please be less dismissive of ideas.
If the whole human race sat down and wrote up a list of things we all wanted done, it would probably be even more than we could ever accomplish. Chances are, if you're a human being, you have something on that list, and you have the ability to help complete a task that's on that list as well.
Most jobs aren't necessary for our survival. OK, maybe people shouldn't be forced to work for their survival. But if they want much more than survival, they should do their fair share. And since I want much more than survival, I'd rather more people could pitch in and help out with that.
People would still want to work. But they'll start working on things they actually care about, because they won't be enslaved by their fear that if they quit their jobs they'll end up homeless or without health insurance. Right now so few startups dare to actually imagine new things because investors must be pleased and profit must be made. Plus, if we escaped the job-for-survival mindset, we would actually start focusing on automation. It's a mistake to think that automation hasn't come at the scale we expected because of unprecedented technical challenges. It hasn't come because the government has stopped throwing money on basic research. We need to focus on wild, idealistic, big-scale projects. And admit that the private sector isn't good at radically innovating, because, to radically innovate, you need to have been failing for many, many years, and have someone sustain you throughout those years. The best the private sector can do is catch up and minimize costs, like SpaceX does.
It's utter first-world utopian horseshit to propose this kind of thinking, of all things, as a response to today's unemployment problems. It's like you don't even realize that there are third world migrant workers picking our fruit because every single one of those unemployed college graduates is, to put it bluntly, too spoiled and decadent to do the work. Or that the lifestyle of those unemployed college graduates is made possible by armies of Chinese factory workers.
I don't mean this as a personal attack on anyone. Frankly, I'm probably too spoiled and decadent to pick fruit all day too. But I'm willing to admit that's a weakness on my part, and I'm uncomfortable living in a world where I have to rest my weight on the backs of those who will gladly and happily do what I'm either incapable of or unwilling to do.
The one saving grace for us is that if we depend on people who do things we can't or won't do, then we can climb up the value chain and make them depend on us doing things they can't or won't do. Decadent as it may be to sit in an air-conditioned office and make stupid iPhone games for other spoiled, decadent first worlders to play, at least that guy living in the Foxconn dormitory and assembling iPhones all day might be grateful to us for making sure he still has work. I'm sure the guys who made "Angry Birds" boosted demand just enough to buy a few weeks breakfast, lunch, and dinner for maybe a couple thousand Chinese factory workers.
Pretending there isn't enough work out there and hence we should pay people to do nothing is just an excuse for cultural laziness. I can't imagine any social justice in subsidizing first-world people to contribute nothing and continue to live off the backs of third-world workers. Once those Chinese factory workers and Mexican fruit pickers are out of work because we can replace them with robots, then we can talk.
I bet the migrant workers you romanticise have a different
view than being "stronger" than you and hence doing underpaid back-breaking work in bad conditions and no health coverage...
Romanticize? Not at all, I think they have a right to be outraged that they're practically supporting an idle class on their backs already. Nonetheless it's something I can't or won't do, and that's a flaw on my part.
It's not a flaw on your part. Stop being so moralistic. That kind of job is something that NOBODY needs to do. If we really tried, we could automate those jobs within a couple of decades or less. But we won't because those workers are possibly even cheaper than the maintenance of a potential automation solution, not to mention the R&D that would be needed to arrive there.
> That kind of job is something that NOBODY needs to do. If we really tried, we could automate those jobs within a couple of decades or less.
OK, so let's all go without fruit for 20 years? No, that kind of job is something that SOMEBODY needs to do for as long as a couple more decades, and it's something that SOMEBODY has needed to do for the entire history of the human race. If somebody needs to do it, why can't you or I? Because we're so fucking spoiled and lazy that we get worked up over having to work in cubicles?
I get your argument. I think any good programmer is insulted by the notion of doing something a machine could do. And if it was between me and a machine, I'd happily sit on my ass and not worry about it, just like I happily sit on my ass and don't worry about calculating square roots. But it's not between me and a machine, it's between me and another human being who was born in less fortunate circumstances and goes out of his way for opportunities that I feel are below me. For someone in our position to sit around blithely talking about how automation can solve the problem "within a couple of decades", as if that's a solution to labor rights and unemployment today, is like one of America's founding fathers writing about the inalienable rights and freedoms of man while owning slaves.
Who is going to pay for that? The broke US government? If 1/3 of the US pop was given $25k/year, it would amount to 1/4 of our GDP.
Until we have ubiquitous power sources, food replicators, cheap teleportation, solved all health problems and sturdy insta-houses, its just a pipe-dream.
The social implications would be even worse. You would have about 10% of society supporting about 50% of society, which would easily create the biggest class divide the US has ever seen. The bottom would ask for more, the top would own the government (because government that size would be corrupt to the core, theres no way it wouldnt).
It would ultimately lead back to a feudalistic society.
Milton Friedman (of all people!) had a pretty worked-out proposal for it, though he was going more for a poverty-line basic income. Basically, everyone (rich and poor) would get a refundable tax credit roughly equal to the poverty line (something like $11k), rather than having a specific cutoff or phase-out. It would implicitly phase out for richer people because a flat $11k credit just doesn't equal too much if you're making a lot of money.
At the time, at least, he argued that it could almost entirely be paid for just by rolling all our current welfare programs into it: instead of this patchwork of welfare, food stamps, section 8 housing assistance, etc., just have one refundable tax credit, thereby massively reducing both the bureaucracy and the market distortions while still providing a social safety net.
In Australia, we almost match this by (a) having a "Low Income Tax Offset" (being fazed out in favour of an $18k tax free bracket) and (b) having a wide-reaching 'Centrelink' social security scheme. One of our greatest worries as a nation is that we're very dependent on such structural measures, but that we're using a medium-term cyclical benefit (the mining boom) to pay for it.
Not that I necessarily agree with the views of the parent post (I don't know them well enough), but I think you're looking at "now" to argue the impossibility of "then". In other words, I don't think our current society really reflects much of what society will have to become in the fairly near-term future.
We already have effectively unlimited energy in the form of the sun (we currently collect only a tiny, tiny fraction of its full output), I don't see how teleportation factors into it, food production seems likely to become almost entirely robot-driven within, say, a 50 year time-frame (by competitive influence), we're progressing by leaps and bounds in the area of human health, and population management will obviously be necessary to balance quality-of-life and resource concerns.
You can't anticipate anything though. Perhaps someday we will have a bucolic utopian society, but we can't make current decisions based on those assumptions.
You can't anticipate anything? I think you need to expand on that.
I don't think I saw anyone advocating making decisions now based on assumptions of a Utopian society. Personally, I advocate making decisions now that increase the odds of said Utopian society.
