I feel like as a long term holder of Nvidia I have enjoyed their business decisions thoroughly enough to say I wouldn't be disappointed if it was memed enough that one day they see this Nvidia logo as some sort of inherited "Eye of Horus" god clan of mathematics and machinery.
Assuming we have an ice age because let's be real that's the best way to make sure everything plastic or nonmetal stays preserved.... Ice age for most things, but we leave the technology buried near an area with high probability of pyroclastic flow.
That, or we get real and we begin leaving time capsules with mathematical proofs and scientific discoveries, maps, etc, on the moon and other planets.
I agree that it is not a store of value, but if we agree on that then I would also ask if you think the current fiat system we have serves the purpose of serving as a store of value.
I think it doesn't do this as we have seen the value of gold shift so much over time.
If we look at Roman Empire during Augustus, your average denarius penny in the empire was worth about 10 hours of minimum wage. A denarius was about 1/10 of a troy ounce of silver, and you needed 25 of these to get an 8 gram gold coin, the aureus.
Going by today's standards, your typical 8 gram coin is worth $604.96 USD
If we go by the average minimum wage in the United states, 25 days at $72.5 USD/day for 10 hours of minimum wage, in order to compare to the Roman Empire during Augustus, pre-tax, the same coin was worth $1812.50 USD.
So to briefly summarize:
1 denarius penny = 1/10oz Silver = 10hrs minimum wage, 4 hours minimum wage today nets 10 times the Silver it did 2000 years ago. You can quickly see that if anything, on the basis of Silver alone, that our currency is worth about 23.7 times more than the currency of Rome ever was if we ignore taxes.
3-5% tax rate on total wealth was murder and why riots happened to begin with.
Then we look at the cost of a average small villa in that time period- 200,000 denarii.
You figure this means 200,000 days for your average agricultural worker at 1 denarii/day, but actually it's way more than that because there's the 3-5% wealth tax on them, plus the tax collector wages came from whatever they could extort on top of that.
200,000/365 = 548 years of payments only to a house at 1 denarii/day.
200,000/30 years= 6666.66 denarii/year
6666.66/270 (because I'm nice and assume we get days off in this time period (today)) = 24.69 denarii/day, or about 98.8% of an aureus per day, would be required to own a small villa on a 30 year mortgage during the Emperor Augustus roman empire, (excluding the extreme 3-5% annual total wealth tax).
I figure most people here would agree that even at minimum wage, a personal villa is much more accessible today. Even a $1,000,000 home on minimum wage with zero other expenses or taxes, working 10 hour days, 5 days a week, would basically pay it off on a 51 year mortgage at 1631.25/month.
I think that's why so many people here feel ripped off. Homes would be much more affordable if the loan terms were slightly longer, but there's a bunch of old people out there trying to min/max their investment based income before they die.
I don't see anything wrong with them wanting to do that, but I think it would be wise if consumers began to push for longer mortgages because as a function over time, while the dollar is still worth quite a bit, it is nonetheless losing value. Keeping your mortgage going means the bank gets less value out of the loan over time, assuming inflation remains static.
I know you didn't expect this reply but I enjoyed learning and making it. If you end up going back over it and have any corrections you'd like to make I'm all ears, but I'd agree. Crypto is a crappy place to have a store of value right now and arguably you'd be a fool to not have it invested in the stock market targeted index fund because that's simply how the world of finance works today.
It's not about what we can do in a day, it's about how we can leverage the income to get more done in a day, even if it's not being done by us directly. That's why investing in the stock market, in stocks you trust as a consumer, is so important to the success of capitalism long term.
I don't know about anyone else here but if I had 40k laying around in Cryptocurrency I would have taken some of that and bought a MacBook pro that didn't have my personal information on it for coding, for a start.
Are you sure about that? There were no airliners for most of human history, so how could any statement about airliner whistleblowers stand for "entirety of human history"?
Probably because the first Boeing whistleblower died by suicide and the second Boeing whistleblower died due to a stroke secondary to a respiratory infection. The idea that either of these were murders is a stupid conspiracy theory with no supporting evidence, and it deserves to be heavily downvoted.
I feel like Steve Jobs also fits this category if we are going to talk about people who aren't really worthy of genius title and used other people's accomplishments to reach their goals.
We all know it as the engineers who made iPhone possible.
Someone far more deserving of the title, Dennis Ritchie, died a week after Jobs' stupidity caught up with him. So much attention to Jobs who didn't really deserve it, and so little to Dennis Ritchie who made such a profound impact on the tech world and society in general.
I think Ritchie's influence while significant is overblown and not entirely positive. I am not a fan of Steve Jobs, who had many reprehensible traits, but I find it ridiculous to dismiss his genius. Frankly, I find Jobs's ability to manipulate people more impressive than Ritchie's ability to manipulate machines.
The main reason C and Unix became widespread IMHO is not because they were better than the alternatives, but rather because AT&T distributed them with source code at no cost, and their motivation for doing that was not altruistic, but rather the need to obey a judicial decree or an agreement made at the end of an anti-trust court case under which IBM and AT&T were ordered not to enter each other's markets. I.e., AT&T was prohibited from selling computer hardware and software, so when they accidentally found themselves to be owners of some software that some universities and research labs wanted to use, they gave it away.
C and Unix weren't and aren't bad, but they are overestimated in comments on this site a lot. They weren't masterpieces. The Mac was a masterpiece IMHO. Credit for the Mac goes to Xerox PARC and to Engelbart's lab at Stanford Research Institute, but also to Jobs for recognizing the value of the work and leading the first implementation of it available to a large fraction of the population.
More like ppl on this site know and respect Jobs for his talent as a revolutionary product manager-style CEO that brought us IPhone and subsequent mobile Era of computing.
I owned a ML based company with an emphasis on Edge computing for the better part of two years, made $150/hr to collect the necessary data alone, and having one client was more than enough income.
The danger of mediocre success that the author speaks of is actually the danger of indeterminate market movement being identified as meaningful in a naturally open system, then attempting to draw meaningful conclusions about the data when the most likely cause for, "mediocre success" is you simply haven't had enough time in the market. Many of the traits we associate with good business require word of mouth and first hand or second hand experiences with a company's output/services. Accessibility and availability to your client or consumer is the primary reason businesses fail, and on top of that, most marketing tactics suck valuable equity from the businesses, to the point where people are hired on to determine how much money it will take to gather more clients to cover the costs of the campaign.
This is nothing new.
Frankly, I have found networking events and bars to be the best generators of clients. I never openly advertise what I do, (except technically in this comment), but often times I instead talk with people and ask what they do for a living, if they enjoy it, etc. I could make the argument that I waste my time at these places, but ultimately the whole reason I even own the company is from being at those places and chatting people up, taking them out of the crazy warped reality we get piped in from mass media.
This all said, the article just goes to show how many corporations actually do more harm than good to themselves based on the data they collect and what they believe it correlates to or what the causation may be. These deterministic representations of what reality might actually be for a business owner, or anyone in any situation, is a neo-classical example of Uncertainty Principle imo.
To loop back to the top,
My concern is the author suggests that a business model is created and built when you don't have clients or a working idea of how to directly target them in the first place besides a phone call. The best advertising is client word of mouth,and time in the market. You won't have either of those things until you focus on making one client at a time happy, disclosing what you can and cannot do, laying out realistic expectations and deadlines for them or you, having a contract for any services rendered, if they choose a competitor after signing for the same purpose, that sort of thing, and perhaps most importantly having a business centric understanding of if it makes sense to have the upkeep costs of an entire business as opposed to self realizing what those costs can be up front, clausing your contract as a contractor to cover those costs you might write off in the process of the project for the client, and sticking it out as a lone wolf who gets the job done properly, and as defined by the contract ,when needed.
Maybe my comments will stop someone from setting up a LLC or S corp. To be honest, I wish I had never done so and I should have just ate the contractor taxes instead. Currently, there's a emphasis on volume of production with these corporations, so the cost of paying 10 engineers for a year is much less the cost mentally of trying to do all these things yourself, one client at a time, as a business that has all the same tax benefits or penalties of a larger company with definable cost of goods sold because those people go home at night instead of you the business owner who might pull all nighters or get anxiety over things you can't get finished due to unforeseen circumstances, and no team to back you up.
In the end, the best way to start a business is to gamble a million Dollars with a need in the market for what you offer, at a price clients are willing to pay, and a level of attention to detail they might not get from a larger company in exchange for building trust with you as opposed to a market leader. You hire a few really good, overqualified engineers and people who are willing to tell you then you are doing a bad job or wrong, and you take their collective advice. Most of the time, you are going to be the one who needs to improve, and most of the time, you aren't going to like that feedback as a business owner. It will confuse you, you will want to give up. You will have sleepless nights, you will have nightmares about the most superficial things such that it really wouldn't be much different than getting emotionally invested in Dance Moms even though you've seen all the seasons by proxy 4 times already.
But, those people have ideas. Those people have visions, and ultimately, the best way to run a business is to have enough money to accept the business might not pull a profit in year one if you're going to be nice to your employees.
So to all this I suggest:
Don't start a business unless you really, really have a excellent focus on what you want to do with that financial vehicle because depending on how much money it is we live in an an economy where capital gains are taxed less and require less actual work than actually breaking a sweat or going to a job, assuming you have enough money to invest in the market.
I'll probably get down voted to hell for that last quip, but when my investment account had larger gains in a month than I made in a month as a business owner, off of only a 10,000 investment, I felt pretty stupid. Obviously I can't guarantee that profit/loss, but that's why you make that money in the market while you can, quit your day job if the market investment pays more, and go find something amazing and new to build that just might change the world.
I truly apologize for this.... Block of text. This article just seemed to skip over some really key things that are a reality for many a small business owner.
My experience with it was even after charging $200/hr for data collection, for the better part of two years, having a single client was all I needed. Looking back, I would have happily taken a larger tax hit as a contractor than go through the trouble of creating an entire company. I reinvested all that money into development kits, educational resources for myself, and now I'm sitting at home without a job this year, coding and learning whatever I want to code in the hopes that I develop something people appreciate and enjoy using, or finds some wonderful niche purpose worth charging money over.
If I cared about money, my business would still have clients but I'd be much less happier and I'd have the same number of employees -- myself.
Owning a business to me means putting out quality products that do what people ask, runs efficiently, is easily read and understood, and meets customer expectations in a timely and financially sound manner.
Hiring another employee isn't gonna do that unless I can afford good employees, and I can't feel good about what I pay good employees unless I have enough money to pay them what I would like to pay myself. The expectation being that they take the same level of time and care that I would if their task was my own, so I don't have to go review all their work all the time.
I'd be happy paying devs 400k/1m/year+ and having the best team of devs in the world and only taking home 100k as their manager, if it meant we make quality products, and everyone who works there is happy, and some of the stress of being a business owner could be relieved.
Sure I could take more money home but ultimately my goal is to make sure we can do what clients need us to do and set realistic expectations and at the end of the day that's a high price to pay upfront for services like a company like mine would be, but cheaper than a lifetime of dealing with errors, code problems, you all know what I'm talking about.
Have a good day folks and don't be afraid to charge what you are worth for your services. Yes, there are people out there developing products making ridiculous amounts of money, money you could stockpile and turn into your own business someday without worrying about the struggle bus mediocre success, limited working capital concept this author talks about.
Assuming we have an ice age because let's be real that's the best way to make sure everything plastic or nonmetal stays preserved.... Ice age for most things, but we leave the technology buried near an area with high probability of pyroclastic flow.
That, or we get real and we begin leaving time capsules with mathematical proofs and scientific discoveries, maps, etc, on the moon and other planets.