“A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a scalable, repeatable business model.” — Steve Noble.
“A startup goes through three phases: first, the search for the business model, (dysfunctional families are an advantage), second, operating exec to take from startup to operations. From operating to scaling.”–Steve Noble
Trying to get my arms around a pitch (or even whether I want investors at all),
Source date (UTC): 2015-01-18 20:03:00 UTC
ANGEL INVESTING
Listening to other Angels right now. I invest 10K to 100K in businesses I can understand, can understand how to take to marketing, that I could take over if I had to, with people I enjoy spending time with. It’s not complicated. I can only understand a limited range of things. I can only afford so much time to understand anything I already don’t. But it is very rarely a question of the ‘goodness of the idea’. Its only a question of whether I can figure out if I will get my money back, and possibly with some profit.
Source date (UTC): 2015-01-18 10:16:00 UTC
ON CHINA
Broadberry’s data presents a more nuanced picture. In it we can clearly see the economic “efflorescence” of China’s medieval economic revolution and the wealth that came with the mid-Ming economic reforms. In many of these periods the average Chinese man was more wealthy than his European counterpart. China was far from stagnant for 1,000 years.
But it also never had sustained economic growth. As happened across the premodern world, successful dynasts would establish a system that allowed commerce to flourish, urban centers to grow, and wealth to increase. In the words of Jack Goldstone, these societies would undergo an economic “efflorescence” that historians of later days would remember as a Golden Age [3]. These Golden Ages would not last. After a few centuries these societies would push agrarian civilization to its limits and contraction would begin.
This process is seen quite clearly in the Chinese data. The decline in GDP per capita between 1600 and 1750 hides the fairly impressive economic achievements of the early Qing: despite a fourfold (!) increase in population, Chinese living standards remained on par with most of Europe, even though most of this expansion was happening in unproductive, virgin lands far away from China’s traditional urban centers while expensive levies were continually raised to pay for one war after another. Alas, this type of efflorescence could not endure; as the centuries passed the condition of the Chinese peasant plummeted. It is sobering to realize that the average Chinese of 1000 was twice as rich as his descendents were 850 years later.
Source date (UTC): 2015-01-06 04:57:00 UTC
“Wrong. It takes volunteers. But if there are no volunteers, it takes a capitalist to incentivize the people to change the bulb. At which point the bulb gets changed and the worker earns money for doing it.” — Greg Bowman
Source date (UTC): 2015-01-02 07:17:00 UTC
—“The first problem in life is to stay alive. The second problem is to stay free. The third problem is to stay productive, so that productivity will take care of you. In many societies, it’s a challenge just to solve the first problem, and the second two are luxuries. Many more societies are relatively safe, but victims of the second problem: they have predatory/weak criminal justice systems that engender little to no faith in the legitimacy of their government. If people feel their freedom can be taken away at any time for essentially no reason, why even worry about the third problem? For a society to thrive, all three problems of human life have to be protected by law: life, liberty, and the pursuit of prosperity.”— James Louis LaSalle
(EDITED FOR CLARITY)
Source date (UTC): 2014-12-29 11:48:00 UTC
I have always felt that the Austrian inter-temporal structure of the production cycle was a little old fashioned but of metaphor given that firms have evolved to multiple networks of more dynamic investment structures wherein each unit is more perishable, and where each is far less dependent upon a planned structure of production and instead is constantly shuffling portfolios of production among customers.
And I’ve felt that the problem not just of cycles, nor of exhaustion of opportunities, nor of forming networks to exploit opportunity, but that at some point we approach the problem of having created enough consumption that people are decreasingly willing to trade increases consumption of signals for leisure, or even for doing *nothing*. ( I certainly have reached that point – the sole purpose of money is to associate with peers, and disassociate from undesirables. In that sense my consumption is primarily one of location. ) I mean, american males are exiting society and economy in droves – they can afford to.
So while there always appears to exist possible increases in consumption, one eventually has to resort to the immigration of underclasses to continue generating consumption. This process too leads to booms and busts and social instability.
Source date (UTC): 2014-12-25 03:24:00 UTC
STOMPING ON MARXIST BUNNIES
—“The chief benefactor of consumer capitalism has been… consumers, of course. (Something Marx didn’t foresee.)”— Curt
—“False on two levels. First the benefit has been to both groups, largely for the bourgeois and Marx never said there would be no benefit for workers. Please learn something about Marxist theory.”— Well meaning fool.
RESPONSE
I know quite a bit about marxist theory, I just know even more about economics.
First: Empirically measure the two statements. Demonstrate the change in the relative consumption of lower and upper classes. At present all upper class consumption is relegated entirely to signaling and retirement savings. That’s the data. Period. Otherwise consumption is nearly linear all the way down into the lowest quintile.
Ergo, the chief benefactor has been a disproportionate increase in relative consumption of workers and a decrease in relative consumption of the upper classes. The reward has been vastly disproportionally weighted to consumers, while natural aristocracy (the upper classes) have been relatively impoverished. And my statement (like most of my statements) stands. Period.
Second: To say “marx never said something” is a deceptive argumentation technique from hermeneutic scripturalism. Regardless of what one says or argues, one’s theories must correspond to demonstrated behavior in objective reality.
Third: you engage in another marxist form of deceptive argumentation by casting labor (unskilled lower classes without market utility, and therefore without utility to other human beings) and consumers as the same. So your attempted deception (spin) is just that: marxist deception.
Marxist premise is that exploitation occurs in voluntary exchange, whereas the aristocratic premises is that unskilled classes with nothing to trade are a dead weight on productive society. That there is some ‘common good’ that is an excuse for theft and predation, rather than voluntary cooperation. yet they threaten revolution (violence against life and property) if their demands are not met. Which is no different from the upper and middle classes using violence to defend their property that was obtained in voluntary exchange.
But the fact of the matter is, that cooperation is only rational in the absence of parasitism. So if you have nothing to trade, no reason to cooperate, and you seek to use parasitism by verbal justification, political deception or physical insurrection, then you are merely an enemy that must either be tolerated, ostracized, or enslaved, or exterminated if necessary.
This is the Nietzchean interpretation of morality.
(The argumentative technique I am using is quite different from that of Christian apologetics. It’s purely moral: cooperation is only rational under voluntary exchange. And so I do not truck with altruistic punishment. I revel in it Nietzschean ridicule of it.)
Source date (UTC): 2014-12-16 09:08:00 UTC
We have grown used to our luxuries – spending our heritage. Spending down our normative capital. And we have been able to spend it down only because of a temporary technological advantage. We have inserted tremendous risk into our civilization by assuming that the economic advantage of fossile fuels, upon which industrial and post industrial modernity is built, is something that we can perpetuate – which seems at least possible – and that we will retain our advantage over the rest of the world, and that all others in the world will not equilibrate that advantage – which seems impossible.
The problem is that we cannot exit the risk that your assumption places on the rest of us, while you can internalize the opportunity of your preference without exporting the risk onto us.
Source date (UTC): 2014-12-15 04:54:00 UTC
[I] couldn’t care less about social justice and equality. I despise the terms and the feelings that inspire them.
But when a young man who is willing and able to work, and work hard, to feed his family cannot find work, and the only reason that he cannot is low trust, no credit, and low economic velocity – that makes me angry.
I know too many men here who want to work, are willing to work, at ANY work, to feed and house their families, that cannot find it. And they cannot find it while government bureaucrats seek pervasive rents and participate in pervasive corruption.
And it makes me want to kill every living soul in that government that I can get my hands on.
We need to bring back the guillotine.
[I] couldn’t care less about social justice and equality. I despise the terms and the feelings that inspire them.
But when a young man who is willing and able to work, and work hard, to feed his family cannot find work, and the only reason that he cannot is low trust, no credit, and low economic velocity – that makes me angry.
I know too many men here who want to work, are willing to work, at ANY work, to feed and house their families, that cannot find it. And they cannot find it while government bureaucrats seek pervasive rents and participate in pervasive corruption.
And it makes me want to kill every living soul in that government that I can get my hands on.
We need to bring back the guillotine.