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Comment by chrisco255 | Hacker News Reader

Anyone can start a company under capitalism. You are empowered to create wealth yourself and enrich yourself from that creation. That's a beautiful thing and should not be taken for granted.

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Anyone with enough capital, though.

In the 20th century you needed a lot of capital to start a company. In the 21st century, you don't.

So how much capital do you reckon you need to start a company, and why isn't that amount "a lot"?

A friend of mine got an MBA at MIT and started a company. He had to spend the first 6 months without any income, living off his savings. On top of the capital he needed to start it.

MIT provides a great book on learning deep learning. Amazon web services and many other big name virtualization services provide free trial periods for their services. A raspberry pi and a cheap tv and keyboard/mouse will get you the ability to write programs and you can get free phone service and internet with absurdly cheap smartphones available at most retail stores. All of the courses you need to work up to a masters in theoretical physics are available through MIT OCW and the perimeter institute or other programs(Stanford, UCI), and there are many programs that will help you with starting up a company. There's no excuse nowadays. A couple of years ago, yes, but now, there's no excuse.

Where do you get rent and food while you're earning the masters degree online?

Get a job as a security guard? Security guards have a surprising amount of down time when it comes to work, and one of my good friends wrapped up his degree while working as a security guard on campus. That's not what you want to hear though. What you likely want to hear is 'Free Monayz!' Well either you're taking that money from someone else who earned it productively or you're taking that money from someone who saved it in the form of inflation if you print it.

So let me get this straight: your solution to labor's subservience to capital is for all the millions of working poor to get jobs as security guards while earning degrees in theoretical physics?

I get what you're trying to say, but you're proposing an individual solution (that cannot scale) to a systematic problem.

What capital? We're not building widgets here. You take advantage of the resources that are given to you and make something of yourself. That's how it works.

And any labor force can organize, go on strike or simply leave. (edit: responded to the wrong post, sorry.)

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