Exactly what I was thinking. Does this still exist in some meaningful form? We used to have an amazing thing there... I remember before Endless September. alt.* was about as free as it gets.
We (family of four, parents 40ish years old) are fortunate enough to be somewhat location independent with the stipulation that we have to be in US/Pacific timezone to keep sane hours. We looked at the Bay Area one more time this year before choosing Reno. Much lower taxes, much better housing choices at our affordability level, general convenience and outdoor recreation in and around Tahoe were the attraction. This area has long been a landing spot for retirees from the BA but it's now booming with younger people and families. It's improving quickly. For someone who owns a business and has some location independence, it's a great choice. Also commercial rents are much more startup-friendly if you need offices and such. A meeting in SF is only a 4 hour drive away. Daily flights to SF and San Jose if you're in a hurry.
On a sailboat "autopilot" generally means "keep this heading" or "keep this point of sail." I'm pretty sure in aviation it means "take me to this way point and elevation" or a sequence of such maneuvers. A plane flies itself or a boat navigates itself only so long as nothing unexpected occurs. In either case, a pilot must be standing by, maintaining awareness, ready to assume control and handle anything that may come up. I'm not sure what people think this means in terms of driving a car but I think it's early enough that Tesla can help define what this means.
The general price of goods plummeting would be seen by most modern economists as something of a disaster -- so occupied are they with engineering inflation. I don't think any mainstream economists have models or theories of economic development or social organization that would take us to a Kardashev level 2 civilization.
It is very interesting to me that the founders have agreed to pay people in very low-cost-of-living areas almost as much as people in San Francisco. I'm pretty sure USD$95k in South Africa, Croatia, or Italy beats the pants off $120k in SF lifestyle wise. I guess the founders have not traveled to these places or fine with overspending?
No one seems to be asking what was done to education to produce the higher graduation rates. Is it really true that everyone is now "smarter" or were standards changed to achieve the desired outcome? What good is it to have a college degree that is marginally superior to or in the case of some majors, no better than a high school diploma of 25 or 40 years ago?
Of course they can. This has nowhere near the wealth spreading effects of an IPO though. First of all, most employees do not own shares but rather options. Option-holders do not receive dividends. You must exercise options to become a shareholder and most rank and file people cannot do this without selling the stock at the same time because it requires them to put cash in. The kind of middle class folks Mr. Cuban wants to enrich do not typically have thousands to invest in their employer.
I did this once prior to an acquisition of a company I worked for and lost the money. It's pretty much a stupid move unless you are already wealthy and a founder or controlling exec with better insight and control over the outcome.
Also, when an employee exercises options and then sells the resulting share in a public company, they receive a multiple of earnings. Earnings != dividends but suppose all the earnings in a period were paid out as a dividend (they wont be of course) -- the shareholder will get only that amount whereas if they sell the share, they will receive a multiple often 10-15x or more of earnings. Most people benefit more from an exciting lump sum payout than an unpredictable drip at a time.
I wish they would be happy to service accounts like mine at $100/month. I prune all the time to stay on my grandfathered plan and not get bumped to $300/month. That said, we are moving most of our private repos which do not require outside collaborators to our self-hosted gitlab. Bonus -- gitlab comes with CI! -- another product I can skip paying XXX/month for. Lest you think we free ride, we've made substantial contributions to gitlab through our paid open source internships.
I started with the conviction that I wanted to be the owner of a successful business. I did this at an age where I already had experienced plenty of wonderful ideas. Ideas always come. I never worry about that. What is important is to be in a position to take something and run with it. For those of us who need an income, that means we have to design and build a business that provides for us (and others) while we await the next great idea.
One such way to build a company is to bootstrap a services business and productize. This is a well-worn path to at least modest size. Another way is to create a studio to fire off many ideas and see what sticks. There are more than a few of these right now.
Many companies and businesses are organically conceived and grown over decades. They are complicated. They start with one thing and move into another. They are not neat and pretty. They grow more based on the longevity, character and commitment of the founder than on the inherent brilliance of any one idea. You don't have to have a flash of inspiration which you test and walk away if it doesn't work. Once you employ people and cultivate their loyalty this type of approach is toxic anyway. It may only work in certain little islands like SV.
Many large businesses are built on successive episodes of inspiration, revelation or innovation that occur over decades, with much perspiration in between.
Business growth is like a multi-stage puzzle. Getting to $100k/yr is one stage. Getting to $1m/yr is another. Getting to $10m/yr is yet another. $100m/yr and so on... Business grows as you and your abilities grow.
A creative person figures out how to solve the puzzles, unlock growth and move in new directions.
Everything is possible if you are not beholden to one narrow model of how to start, finance and grow a business. The first key is to know yourself and what you want.
Agreed. People make more of a deal about this than it is. If you are actually doing business overseas or own an actual operating business corporation overseas employing people (depending on the country), US paperwork looks relatively benign.
The real harm for business people overseas is that opportunities may be closed for you to invest in other businesses or to join a board or something because your status as a US Person causes a burden for others. At the 100 million dollar level I imagine this is not a big deal but at the startup and smaller growth company level it seems problematic. This reduces the opportunity for soft diplomacy and representing the brand of America to foreign people of means and substance.
I would be curious to know if you have experienced or anticipate experiencing this. Perhaps where you are is more closed to foreigners but there are countries where foreigners do lots of business. Have you been invited to invest or participate in boards?
More attention to production and productive activity rather than consumption would help. Industry and thrift is what lifts people's fortunes. Not consumption and debt.
The U.S. has many factors contributing to economic competitiveness but also some serious drags: difficulty accumulating capital savings among the middle and lower classes, inefficient cities and suburbs, housing that is too extravagant and expensive for people of modest means, mortgages still underwater, high cost education and a very expensive health care system riddled with fraud. Most of these are due to unwise policies anchored on the public and private accumulation of debt. All of them are solvable with a proper understanding of the issues.
The complaints about the 1% or 0.1 or 0.01% largely can be traced to the architecture of this system which is anything but a free market. It guarantees large cash flows for favored groups who naturally support it.
Refactoring all this will require a great deal of capital spending, internal migration and a shift in incomes away from sectors that have been supported by policy such as finance, gov, education, entitlements, war, retail and healthcare in favor of redesigning the American lifestyle along leaner, more competitive lines. Think smaller homes closer to work and more sharing. Yes it will look more like other more competitive parts of the world do today. It may be called a depression 20-30 years from now but it's better to think of it as cleanup and refactoring-- a clearing out and reckoning of all the bad decisions and policy driven malinvestments of decades.
The biggest thing many people really have control over is their own lifestyle expectations and location. Naturally young people sense this and are cutting back accordingly. Not sure how many are willing to relocate for opportunity.
For average joes in the U.S. the high water mark was probably the 70s and 80s. The stuff that led to America #1 occurred between 1870 and 1960. We've been coasting for a while pretending we still have a beast under the hood and gas in the tank. It's just now becoming ever more difficult to paper over the situation with more debt.
The U.S. still has amazing positive attributes and strengths. Labor force mobility, the most efficient system for consumer goods distribution in the world, generally high quality building and housing stock (albeit inefficiently spread out), generally high knowledge and expectations of service and quality, etc. The list is actually long and the cultures ability to adapt and reinvent itself is a strong reason not to bet against the U.S.
We could opt for a basic income but not at anywhere near the levels of currently expected individual prosperity. We'd have to redefine poverty to something more along the lines of what the rest of the world considers poverty and say, we can help you avoid that. America is not presently designed to support a "middle class" life at $10-20 a day. Some other counties are.