Getting to Paul Graham levels of wealth and influence is, in fact, very simple:
1. Be white and well-enough off that you know how to talk to rich people.
2. Be in technology on a US coast (West is better, East also works) during the late 1990s— an anomalous time and place with a level of opportunity that appears about once in 250 years.
3. Get really good at programming and use a "10x" programming language like Lisp.
#3 is actually optional, but it's the one people can control so it's the one you get the most fans if you talk about.
Paul Graham had good intentions, I think, but he indirectly contributed to something that ruined a lot of people's lives.
I was there in the mid-2000s. I used to read everything he wrote. I loved his Lisp books. I totally bought into what he was selling. I really admired the guy. He made greed morally acceptable and I was a confused kid. He said that in "the real world" all the petty drama that makes nerds unpopular would go away. (It ain't true. Unless you're in tech in the 1990s, the corporate world is worse than high school.) I considered applying for YC. Looking back, I'm glad I didn't. I know too many people who flew too close to a garbage fire in the Mountain View sky they thought was the sun and are still recovering, 5–10+ years later.
The fact is, I don't dislike Paul Graham. I think he got out of his depth. Y Combinator, though, is a sleazy institution with a record of ageism, atrocious founder quality— the number of YC-backed people who've turned out to be spousal abusers is shockingly high— and marketing-sans-substance. I actually think that most of YC's atrociousness happened in spite of PG's influence and probably set in after he was a major factor.
Who is a serious intellectual? What does that even mean? One thing I know is that serious thinking involves going through many ideas, many of them at risk of being naive or flawed, to sort out how to think about the world.
I could name one person but not only is he banned but I would probably be too if I mentioned him.
"Socialism" may be a word we need to retire, not because it's an invalid concept, but because it means different things to different people.
Democratic socialists largely want a saner version of a market economy, where power resides with labor and government aggressively combats capital's worst tendencies, but they aren't calling for old-style command economies like the USSR, Communist China, or Castro's Cuba.
AOC is a fantastically talented politician with a lot of good ideas, but I think she needs to replace the word socialism with something that has less baggage.
This is the general disadvantage socialism has relative to capitalism in terms of appealing to others. Socialism and communism have more than a hundred years of history, including a lot of mistakes we've had to learn from. Capitalism has no memory and therefore on its own terms has no history.
The problem we have on the Left is that even though 65% of the American population prefers our ideas (when stripped of D/R labels) they don't really like us. We're not very good at branding, and we've let Capital convince half the country that it's actually a "liberal elite" that is holding them down.
We need to get better at getting our actual message out there. The recent victory is a start, but if it were down to ideas rather than personality politics (and, you know, other stuff the other side uses) we'd be up by 20 points in every state.
This is in reference to the American standard business practice ("American Rule") whereby each party to a transaction pays its own legal bills. It is not necessarily connected to the more general American work culture (which I agree is as you characterized it, although I hope that changes with the recent defeat of the final boss of Boomer capitalism).
It's a cuck test. They want to know up front that you'll take abuse. If you "fail", by standing up for yourself, then they'll just work with some other interchangeable would-be founder who's more of a "culture fit".
Legal fees are a rounding error to these companies. It's all about the "power move". They don't want to work with people who'll stand up for themselves over "a measly" $50K.
Envy is a negative-sum emotion. It's no fun to be envious, and while people think it must be enjoyable to be envied, it's really not. When you're aware of it at all, it's just uncomfortable. It's a shitty emotion on both sides, but it's great for capitalism.
Comparing yourself against others is a loser's game. If the person is better, you lose. If the person comes out worse, you're taking a dip by comparing yourself at all to that person, so you still lose.
The cultures wars are stoked by the 0.01% because they want working people divided against each other.
If "blue state" workers think their red-state brethren are incorrigible racist assholes, and "red state" working people think the blue states are full of virtue-signaling effete hypocrites... then capital wins because, even though 75% of the American public likes socialist economic ideas (when stated plainly and without a "socialist" label) they are all fighting each other over unrelated stuff, like whether J.K. Rowling's latest misinformed comment means we should stop reading her.
I'm curious: how do people who are tone deaf learn and use tonal languages? Are such languages redundant enough that they can get by, or do they find other ways of adapting, or do they struggle to speak fluently even if the tonal language is their first language?
What I've observed with novelists is that there are two kinds. There are those who write with frequency but stop at "good enough", the satificers who are usually quite good at keeping their word count within genre bounds, understand market trends, and if they're working full time can put out two or three books per year.
Then there are the ones who spend years studying rhetoric and linguistics, have worlds and characters they've been building for years, and want to write "Big" novels that often hit 200,000 words or more and can't really be compressed. They're as hard working as the prolific crowd, but from the outside it looks like they're dilly-dallying. When they finally publish, they're putting forward the best 200K words out of 2M... which makes a distinction that a few people care about although, to be honest, most readers don't. It's not an economical way to write. You do it because you're chasing some kind of deified Relevance that you'll never fully know if you've achieved because the real test is whether you're remembered 100 years after you die.
I'm immensely curious to see if He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named gets his book out, just to watch the YCs squirm. Rumor through mutual acquaintances is late 2021, but having never met this person, what do I know.
It's psychological, but it also goes from an understanding that profits, in the rigid economic sense, don't reliably exist.
A profit is gain realized by buying things, recombining them using innovation, and selling at a favorable price. A true profit is something you make, again and again, and with diminishing returns because prices move and the gap closes, as with arbitrages. Rents, which are more reliable, are payments you collect because you own things. (You may use those things, or you may, using the more common sense of the word, rent those things out.)
Most "profits" are actually just rents. Rents extracted because the company owns real estate, rents extracted because of brand presence, interest (which is a rent on money) through financing programs, rents extracted because workers' need for daily survival has them systematically underpricing their labor, and rents on political capital (favorable regulatory environment).
Getting paid because you have a great idea is intermittent, and usually requires taking on a lot of risk, and risk is something established companies hate. Getting paid because you own something is easy-as-shit and forever reliable. Where does the car industry make the bulk of its gains? Not on selling the cars, but in financing. It's an evergreen business, so long as there is capitalism-- there will always be people who need money they don't have, and it will always be an easy business to collect the vig.
Regular businesses eventually stop innovating-- they have plenty of smart people, but the bosses don't want to take risks because they're busy collecting personal rents by holding management positions, and obviously don't want to lose that-- and their "profits" converge to the rent roll on the resources they own. That's just how it works. Average equals mediocre, the latter used non-pejoratively.
That said, it's not sexy to imagine that one is investing into companies that have become mere utilities, that will continue to collect rents on the resources they own (of which a person can buy a tiny fractional share of the ownership) but not really do anything interesting.
These ultra-capitalist non-profits (non-profits-for-now) create the illusion that they're something different... that they're "rocket ship" companies run by people with supernatural talent and "vision", that they aren't rent-seekers using capital's native advantage over labor for reliable but unpulchritudinous gains... which is what all large companies are... but, instead, a kind of "new company" that is going to innovate moonshots and synergize us up a new century of prosperity, freedom, and magical puppies that never poop. Smart investors recognize that all of that is bullshit, and that these tech unicorns are just as exploitative as traditional companies (and, in fact, probably more so) but they also realize that dumber investors get the warm fuzzies and that there is therefore a premium.
Socialism has seen plenty of successes. And yes, it has seem some failures.
The problem with communism is that it has too much history. It has a record, some of which is ugly, some of which is littered by some really awful people who claimed (and claim) to be "communists".
The problem with capitalism is that it has no history, no memory. It doesn't get better, and it doesn't learn. It's the same shit today that it was in the time of the Pinkertons. Government did get better at regulating it, but in the past 40 years it has gotten worse at doing so.
As I get older, my theory of charisma is that it's a product, more than it is an innate trait, and that anyone can "become charismatic", although 99.9 percent of people never will, and the worst thing you can do for yourself is try. People seem superhuman-- energetic, brilliant, capable-- when surrounded by people who invest themselves entirely in making them seem so. Steve Jobs had no special social acumen, above-average but not genius-level intelligence, and no more hours in his day than the 24 we all have, but he managed to surround himself with the right people and, for a period of about 20 years, managed to convince the world that he had superhuman powers and a "reality distortion field" when in reality he was just a capitalist who dropped acid once.
Plenty of charismatic people are socially inept, charmless, and unpleasant in close interpersonal relationships, but this doesn't make them any less charismatic on a stage. They often have no genuine friends, but tens or hundreds or thousands of people who will put aside their own concerns to do things for the charismatic individual.
Charisma is a pattern by which other people, for reasons that are hard to parse, and through mechanisms that are invisible, do things for the charismatic person. A charismatic person is threatening because others will kill for him, and he's a desirable benefactor because others will commit resources to his causes, but it seems to be a self-perpetuating phenomenon that snowballs and can carry on for most of a lifetime. It does seem to collapse in old age. This is why charismatic but hideous people like Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump, and Bill Cosby meet such ignominious ends. They're invincible, until they're not.
There are skills that enhance a person's charisma. You can learn rhetoric, public speaking, and the norms of social interaction. But that's all they are: skills. Nothing can guarantee charisma. Nothing can guarantee that you'll get that core set of people to follow you that will produce a snowball effect. On that, it seems to be pretty random who wins and who doesn't.
Charisma exists because people want to be the charismatic person. They want to be someone who can wave a hand and bring ruin to their enemies. What they don't realize is that by following the charismatic, they're defeating their own purpose. It is not traits of the charismatic that generate this feedback loop. It is mostly just luck. That said, the way to improve one's odds to find people who are looking for a charismatic to follow, which means finding new territory, rather than hanging around an existing charismatic in a space where such people are already spoken-for.
Venezuela was done-in by so-called "Dutch disease"-- over-reliance on natural resource extraction, including subsidies for gasoline that made it nearly free-- and Chavez's corruption. He allowed his buddies to buy dollars at the "official" exchange rate which was 4 orders of magnitude out of line with the market rate. Flat-out robbery of the Venezuelan people.
Corporate capitalism is theft, but that doesn't mean all socialists are good or that no socialists are thieves.
I'm a bit older, but I found as well that my mental health didn't fare as bad as I'd feared it would when I first figured out (February) how bad this thing was going to be. In the 2010s, corporate capitalism seemed eternal and unassailable. Dysfunctional, yes, but geared toward entrenchment and self-acceleration (fascism) rather than collapse.
COVID-19 proved corporate capitalism invalid. I would have rather seen socialism succeed than capitalism fail and certain I wish we hadn't had to see over a million people die because of our economic system, but nevertheless, this is an opportunity for the left. Universal basic income is now a mainstream position. Trump, who would have probably be winning if COVID-19 hadn't happened, is now the underdog.
I feel a lot of sympathy for people who are, for the first time in their life, experiencing mental distress, serious ill-health, and disability. I don't mean to understate that. I'm not happy that COVID-19 happened, and I don't think anyone is. For me, though, the uncertainty has kept me going. There's a lot to be afraid of, but there's also cause for hope. It is now not merely a growing sentiment but common knowledge that our economic elite must be overthrown, no matter the cost.
Essentially if the show isn't a hit immediately after release, it won't be renewed, and the threshold required to renew goes up exponentially every season, so essentially a show has to be a runaway hit in order to survive past the second season.
I buy it, but that sucks. I know my view is idiosyncratic, but I view making money like a biological process. Most things have to do it if they want to survive, but it doesn't deserve to be the thing that matters. The Silicon Valley focus on explosive growth, as opposed to healthy and reasonable long-term growth, is bad for the world.
I wonder if they are adequately assessing the risk of this decision model. People get deeply emotionally attached to media, and it's a strong negative when a series you love is cancelled, so this could negatively affect their brand over time. And that's not something which is so easy to design KPI's around as new subscriber numbers.
Right. This is especially true of series with defined story arcs. A sitcom can be ended at any time, but if Breaking Bad had ended at Season 4, it would have pissed off everyone.