You know you are in a regulation bubble when the caution and judgement of the most highly trained professionals in our society is reflexively concluded to be inadequate and inferior to that of bureaucrats even when said professionals are working on the DEAD, whom they have no chance of harming.
The regulation fetish has become a form of magical thinking. In the thinking of the regulation fetishist, the lack of explicit permission from authority is in and of itself dangerous, but the danger could be easily neutralized by a talismanic permit!
The fact that these professionals have already adhered to countless existing regulations and have been trained to safely deal with bodily fluids and infection risk is immaterial to the regulation fetishist. The government has not explicitly granted permission for this exact activity. In this mindset anything that is not enumerated as an allowed activity is dangerous and should be forbidden.
Be careful with these negative HN comments, they have cost me millions.
I first heard about bitcoin right here, when it hit $3 per coin for the first time. That was a huge event.
I had my own reservations about investing in bitcoin, but reading the comments here prejudiced my view.
VC's say it's not the losses that get to you, it's the companies you miss out on that scar you.
Not investing in Bitcoin at $3-5 was the single worst strategic decision of my life.
It was something that could have saved me years of toil, it was an easy ticket into the Big Game. A massive influx of economic energy, a fantastic counterstrike to entropy was right there, and it was easy. So easy to buy, granted it would have been not easy to hold through the dark times, the dips, the panic.
Oh, but if one did!
None of the hard work of starting a company, finding product-market fit, hiring a team, raising funds, fighting off the inevitable bandits that will come for their extortion money in the form of frivolous patent lawsuits...
None of that. Just easy, huge, beautiful, juicy investment capital right at my fingertips.
Oh the land that could have been bought! The development deals that would have flowed and the opportunities that could have been pursued. Instant entrance to Ruling Class, a ticket to the best club on earth.
'The most important men in town would come to fawn on me!
They would ask me to advise them,
Like a Solomon the Wise.
"If you please, Reb Tevye..."
"Pardon me, Reb Tevye..."
Posing problems that would cross a rabbi's eyes!
And it won't make one bit of difference if i answer right or wrong.
When you're rich, they think you really know!"'
- If I Were A Rich Man, Fiddler on the Roof
And it's that emotion thats fueling crypto asset valuations right now, along with actual riches created by people who didn't give in to the negativity, the doubt, the fear.
The thing has value. People like this thing. They like it all over the world. There are infinite uses for something like money + code + global computer networks.
And a thing doesn't have to be perfect or solve every problem to have value.
The standard that commenters here hold crypto to is not the same standard they hold startup companies to.
With companies if they do something some people like enough to use, they say wow what a success, look they are a real company with profits!
I mean even if the only use for crypto currency is regulatory/legal arbitrage, that's insanely valuable and would have merited an investment.
What I got from reading Paul Graham's own writing on the genesis of YC, was that his key insight was that VC's should be funding more companies, and earlier, and giving founder's much more control.
The other key innovation was funding in batches, in classes. This created a close-knit ad hoc community with shared goals, and one in which teams whose ideas were not finding traction could join teams whose ideas were.
Jehu Garcia's Youtube videos are definitely worth checking out, the guy is doing cool things with 18650 lithium ion cells. He converted a VW bus into an electric vehicle. My main takeaway after watching his videos and others in the same vein is that lithium ion battery packs are the gasoline of the 21st century.
You can build 18650 packs for electric bikes, scooters, boats etc... or build your own Power Wall type home electric energy storage.
The costs of these cells coming out of China have gotten down to $1 each in some cases of excess inventory...
A major problem with anonymous sources is not just the inability to verify the claims, even more troubling is the inability to assess the motives of the source and their context and agenda.
The phrase "American officials" connotes an objectivity, as if the information was revealed by God himself.
What is really dangerous is the mainstream media (NY Times, Washington Post) running stories based solely on anonymous sources.
The public has no capacity to vet the credibility of anonymously sourced claims.
Almost all of the current media narrative on the Russian story comes from stories with nothing more than "American officials say".
Remember that "American officials said" that Iraq definitely had WMD. Public support for the invasion was built solely on anonymously sourced news. American officials were actually politically motivated ideologues manufacturing consent, with journalists at the New York Times like Judith Wilson playing the part of the useful idiot.
The same thing is happening right now. This [1] New York Times story is a perfect example.
There is no place for anonymous sources on issues of war and peace in a republic. Allowing this low a bar for journalistic evidence leaves us completely vulnerable to manipulation.
Yes but in the universe of knowledge work, what is work and what is not-work?
Do we count work as "being in the office/lab"? Or do we count work as thinking about the problem?
If one were building a company like Tesla for example, I would count going to the gym and thinking of the problem domain while running on a treadmill as work. I would also count thinking of the problem while going for a walk as work.
If one has really set one's teeth into a nasty problem, things like going to a party, or social calls like seeing friends not engaged in the problem, isn't relaxing, it's frustrating.
I think we should redefine the parameters of this conversation into time that depletes the body and time that replenishes it.
Being in front of a computer for long periods is hard on the eyes, it can be hard physically especially if the ergonomics aren't perfect. Being at the office for long periods can be draining as well because unlike being at home there aren't places to go that are replenishing on demand.
If one has a good sit/stand desk and spends a lot of time coding while standing, 10 minutes lying on a bed is incredibly replenishing for example.
The other dimension here is that perhaps it is alienated work that is inherently depleting. Working for someone else, or on something one does not really want to be working on is draining.
Working on something you care about is invigorating and I can't see how spending less time in that state can possibly be more productive than more time in a productive, non-depleting state.
Agreed, a tremendous work with a dream like quality, a phantasmagoria contrasting vapid American consumer culture, against bloody reality in the lands the great powers toy with.
Also interesting observations on William Gibson's work and the genesis of the EFF.
Definitely worth watching in it's entirety.
It's central thesis, that the current state of affairs has become too complex to predict for elites, and that either a fake, simplified reality is both created and presented to the masses, and also willingly retreated into.
Plus great stuff about the cynicism created by the failure and capitulation of social movements.
One of it's assertions is that Gaddafi willingly accepted a false role as a global supervillian because he liked the attention and status, and was in fact not actually responsible for some of the terrorist acts attributed to him, was completely new to me.
History and reality is hard to know in an age of state sponsored manipulation campaigns, intelligence and counter-intelligence, spycraft and subterfuge.
One has to look at any attribution as highly suspect in this environment. Cui bono?
I think you can look at the alleged Russian hacking of Podesta's emails and the subsequent releases as an example of that perhaps.
But I wouldn't hold out too much hope for an outpouring of democracy and more equitable relations between individuals and states in an age of total global electronic surveillance. That is a weapon that is extremely expensive, complex and singular.
Count me pessimistic, Orwell continues:
"We were once told that the aeroplane had ‘abolished frontiers’; actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable. The radio was once expected to promote international understanding and co-operation; it has turned out to be a means of insulating one nation from another.
The atomic bomb may complete the process by robbing the exploited classes and peoples of all power to revolt, and at the same time putting the possessors of the bomb on a basis of military equality. Unable to conquer one another, they are likely to continue ruling the world between them, and it is difficult to see how the balance can be upset except by slow and unpredictable demographic changes.
For forty or fifty years past, Mr. H. G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons, leaving the ants or some other gregarious species to take over. Anyone who has seen the ruined cities of Germany will find this notion at least thinkable.
Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. James Burnham's theory has been much discussed, but few people have yet considered its ideological implications — that is, the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors."
"It is a commonplace that the history of civilisation is largely the history of weapons. In particular, the connection between the discovery of gunpowder and the overthrow of feudalism by the bourgeoisie has been pointed out over and over again. And though I have no doubt exceptions can be brought forward, I think the following rule would be found generally true: that ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance. Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak."
It's not about short-term masochism, it's about focus.
The human brain is non-scalable neural network.It only has so much bandwidth. The things that create/capture enough value to make big money are almost always non-trivial/hard. Market forces are the reason for that. There is a lot of competition by smart, driven people for the relatively scarce economically viable applications of technology within current market conditions.
And resources will be scarce, help will be scarce, an unending line of people will either want what you have secured or want to destory you via regulation or lawsuits.
Your employees will definitely not care as much as you do, and can get disgruntled and cause bad trouble. It's really best to move through the business world thinking everyone is out to get you. Only the liability paranoid survive.
So for those reasons and more, if you focus on more than health + your business, you are likely to get eaten by someone else who isn't spreading his or her focus as much.
It's very inspiring that you were able to build out an idea like this on a hobby level and get it into YC.
Don't let the negativity in this thread get you down. You will work out all the problems listed in this thread, and zoning change is on the horizon all across the country.
There is a real need for housing like this. Pre-fab housing is a proven model, my father developed modular home projects starting in the '80s and swears by them.
If you ever have been on a stick built job site and have gotten to know the workers well socially, you can see the advantage of indoor, factory precise, standardized construction that is supervised.
There is a lot of substance abuse, laziness and the contractor relationship and payment structure very often goes south in home construction.
I think the best decision you could make today is to ditch the shipping container as the starting point.
Just build them out of wood. It's the cheapest material there is besides some composites perhaps. You already are building a wood framed wall inside the metal container. They could still be made the same size, and shipped the same way.
Many places treat these types of dwellings as mobile homes, and there is probably no form of development that is more widely banned than mobile home parks.
Even putting one of these on your own lot as an accessory structure is going to be very difficult in much of the country.
These rules are all legally codified class discrimination, and is very much largely about middle class single family homeowners keeping out what they call "undesirables".
In their worldview, "undesirables" can include anything from a mixed use building with commercial on first floor and an apartment on top, to turning a single family home into a duplex, but there is nothing more detested by these folks than mobile home parks.
It's an American caste system and it leads to unnecessary high housing prices. Very broadly, America doesn't want to invest in fixing social problems and there is a big focus on just moving the problem to other areas. The counter-productive part of this is that high housing costs drain resources from families and that induced poverty state leads to the social problems that are trying to be hidden in the first place.
Zoning is in need of serious reform, it is possible to go up against it and it is possible to win. I have, but it wasn't easy, and you really need public opinion on your side.
Market positioning can make the difference, and there is opportunity for things to change due to the bad economic position many towns find themselves in. Many places simply can't afford their snobbery anymore.
The rebranding happening with the tiny home movement has a chance at breaking through this and I hope that it does.
I would love to develop a piece of land with a group of affordable small houses but it's a total non starter in my area.
Buy, rehab, rent, refinance distressed residential property. I also manage two commercial properties.
I was born into it, but then didn't want to do it after college. I got back into it because I saw an opportunity that was too good to miss and I took it, now I'm hooked and expanding.
Some of the reasons I stayed away have changed. Just one example, paints used to be fairly heavily laden with VOCs and breathing that stuff is terrible for you for a number o reasons. Now zero/low-voc paint is really good and cheap. I wouldn't have wanted to paint an entire interior of a house with that stuff back then, now I am like Michaelangelo and the house I am working on is like my Sistine Chapel :)
Well there is Bigger Pockets, and some of their video podcasts on Youtube are quite good when they interview a knowledgeable guest.
They are pretty honest about things, but I feel like there's kind of a similarity with their messaging and the passive income/get rich quick world, although they will definitely tell you it's a get rich slow method, but it sometimes has that kind of feel to me.
But they cater to a lot of newbies. I come from a different perspective because my father was a landlord of a decent number of properties and I grew up in it.
I would say the biggest predictor of success is going into the right market and finding a good deal. Your profit or loss is determined by the deal you make.
There are a lot of people that buy houses far away from themselves and get property managers to operate for them for a fee. I personally would never buy a lot of properties far away from my home, and I feel like a lot of the people that do, do it from a kind of Dunning-Kruger false confidence, or maybe just a way lower anxiety level about what could go wrong than me.
You want to walk the property, you want to keep an eye on things, you want to make sure things are taken care of because you have a lot of liability as a landlord, and that's why I would only buy fairly close to where I lived.
Also at the level of buying and renting single family homes, duplexes, triplexes and so on, if you start paying contractors to do work every time something breaks it's going to eat into profit margins or possibly destroy them, at least until you've owned the property for a long time and rents have risen.
At that level of investing your profits are going to come from the work you put in yourself, or the price appreciation of a rising market over the long term. It's different if you can do bigger deals, larger buildings with more units.
If people are interested I might start blogging about real estate investing for developers.