Entrpreneurship Means I Give Up
morecrows.wordpress.com
morecrows.wordpress.com
> poorly researched
> Energy determinism
> What was your major?
> Meta: How is such a low quality post getting so many upvotes?
I think a lot of people are missing the point of this post. Let me explain how I read it and why I've upvoted it.
I think the essence of the piece is this: So, what’s a smart person to do to avoid pauperism? Well that’s obvious, isn’t it? Create your own job! Start a new business in a day! Making… well… this is the part where it gets tricky. If it were apparent what businesses need started already, they’d be started already. The first “job” today’s kids have to answer is, what the hell am I going to do that anyone is willing to pay me for? And each kid, increasingly, is expected to answer this alone as an individual.
On the one hand, I think this is true, and well said. The economy is changing in such a way that we are being increasingly forced to find our own way, as she says, individually. Anyone who wants to be successful needs to identify and develop their own unique talent.
Where I disagree with her is whether this change is salutory in the long run. I believe that it will be: that it will unlock human potential in a way the world has never seen.
But I understand that this process is discouraging and scary for many, and that there will be losers as well as winners. I think it's good to be reminded of that, and I think this post expresses well what many people are probably feeling.
Entrepreneurship should not be a generally advisable path for young people. It's high risk and requires some uncommon traits (resilience, resourcefulness, and hard work more than being "smart"). If you're leading average college students into entrepreneurship you're causing a lot of unnecessary misery.
Individuals have a lot of control over their economic value through their choice of what they study. There are still large portions of the student body which choose majors where empirically the graduates end up working in low paying service jobs. If you're choosing what to study, it should be a function of both what appeals to you and what is economically valuable. The average student seems to only consider the former, which leads to lots of people who think they are increasing their economic value in college, but are not (at least not by much).
(Some universities put out great empirical data on the economic value of majors, e.g. https://career.berkeley.edu/Survey/2015Majors)
I remember that book "Hubbert's peak" that came out around 2000, to his credit he did say that the bullet could be dodged if somebody figured out how to deliver energy into shale in such a way to get the trapped oil and gas out and you know somebody did.
Some other guys had a site called "dieoff.com" that predicted that electric grids would go down circa 2013.
The one thing that is predictable about energy pricing is that it is volatile in the short term and remarkably stable in the long term.
We have enough energy in the nuclear waste that is already above ground to run our civlization for a few centuries, we may not have the will to use it yet, but that will will materialize if things get dire enough. Fukushima set things back a few decades, but it is not a story about nuclear power being dangerous as much as it is the operators being too cheap to spend $1M fortifying the diesel generator installation a bit.
As the article alludes, it is a political problem. Many powerful governments are controlled to some degree by fossil-fuel tycoons (including the US), and these vastly wealthy people won't allow their governments to switch.
Actually the chemical industry made huge amounts of $$$ from each transition. For instance, you can't get a generic asthma inhaler now because all of the CFC-free formulations are patented and by the time those go off patent they will have finally determined it is safe to puff fluoroketones and they will ban HFCs and there will be another decades of paying extra for asthma inhalers.
Sometimes big industries suffer due to policy decisions. Sometimes they take advantage of change and make money. Sometimes they use their money to fight the change instead.
Oil companies happen to fall into the last category with no sign things will change.
The tax system was insane long before Turbo Tax came on the scene. Sure they may have a vested interest in the status quo but they didn't create the insanity and they are not the primary cause it's not being reduced.
Anyway, we don't need to use 0 fossil fuels to stop climate change.
I'm not saying they aren't part of the solution. But, we need to recognize the scale and complexity of the problem. Solving or at least weathering it will require multiple angles of attack, significant time, effort, engineering work and quite likely scientific advancement.
The public wants to go green, but only if nobody has to be inconvenienced with it.
its this simpleton idea that fixing fossil fuel consumption is a magic bullet. when I see these articles I usually get part way through and think, okay it would be nice if he read more than the top to search results in google before writing this tripe
*There are cases, but they're mostly in the past and in the wake of the rebalancing during the post-WWII era.
It is a problem of alternatives; the alternatives aren't really in place yet. Ironically, the wealthy can afford them.
This is not a Medium post about why Startup.ly failed and what they learned. This a person who is fundamentally different from the typical HN poster. They're very much conscious of a bifurcation of the economy in which there are "winners" and "losers." We would generally be called the winners and the author one of the losers. (I'm not insulting them, I think they would agree with that assessment). They're not in a situation where most people are doing great, but there are a few exceptions. Most things and people they know are deeply broken.
The current system that lead to that bifurcation is the one we'd be betting our hopes for getting off fossil fuels on. It hasn't been all cupcakes are roses, so maybe don't bet everything on it.
Speaking personally, my gentrified urbanite lifestyle wouldn't likely be too changed- I don't own a car to buy fuel for and the electric bill for my tiny apartment isn't irksome, the price of groceries would go up but even a 2- or 3-times increase wouldn't meaningfully impact my budget. My job is sufficiently abstracted from physical industry that its not going to be rendered uneconomical by any sudden change in global circumstances. But my lifestyle is very strange in this regard (and I'm probably missing some ways in which I would be meaningfully effected.)
If you're living out in the boondocks (requiring a car to get anywhere) far inland (so all your food and etc is shipped in likely via truck) and working a blue-collar job (in an industry or context that can be outsourced, rendered unnecessary, or simply done without, in case of economic downturn,) a 2x rise in the price of oil could absolutely destroy your life. The vast majority of humans on this planet don't have the sort of economic buffer that they could tighten their belts to cope with the economic retraction entailed by decreasing energy availability. The governmental and economic elite have "given up" that approach because no one wants to be responsible for that sort of catastrophe.
It is valid, I guess, to be of the opinion that "since the world might literally end otherwise, needs must", but I don't get the impression that the author is of this mentality. In either case, they would likely agree that in the face of this extreme option, ways to cheat around it ought to be explored.
Wut? I'm pretty sure the AMA would never let Med school seats exceed the number of residency positions.
First step to an innovative culture is to not trying to make everyone the same, which is likely one of the most basic ingredients of real change. Next is to help people be innovative in a way that's what is need; mainly see thinking like this at successful advance R&D labs.
ALL of the accessible fossil fuels will be released eventually. Whether you have carbon credits or anything else. It's just a question of how fast. So we may as well assume that it's all going to be released. And the next question is: what should we do about it?
The answer is planting more trees and plankton to capture the carbon from yhe atmosphere but not burn it!!
1) Trees used to be a lot more abundant before fossil fuels were a big a thing, but now people are using the land the trees would need for other things (e.g. farming, cities) that are unlikely to be displaced.
2) At some point organic carbon sinks will hit equilibrium as the organisms that compose them start to die and decompose.
And then it won't matter if te carbon sinks hit equilibrium. I am actually surprised how for most of the planet's history there was an equilibrium, when the gases distribute so globally. How does the system adjust without collapses? I think there was once a great oxygenation event, which killed off most anaerobic life on the planet. But since then there's been equilibrium...
The problem is that this model is not guaranteed optimal. In academia, centralized big projects have sometimes reaped great rewards.
Economists Advise Nation’s Poor To Invent The Next Facebook
http://www.theonion.com/article/economists-advise-nations-po...
What was your major?
A common misconception among young people in America seems to be that all majors are equally economically valuable. What you study matters more than whether you have a college degree.
You can do what you love even if it's not economically valuable... just put your focus on something that is economically valuable and use that as a foothold.
Get a degree from [top tier school] and it probably can be any degree because the school itself is a filter that gets "the best" however they define it. Get a degree from [2nd tier or worse school] and it better be something that demonstrates academic or intellectual rigor.
But outside of a degree, another market signal is relevant experience. Considering the teenage and young adult unemployment rate, that is harder and harder to get.. which means they start their professional/productive years that much later, which means responsible adulthood comes later, which means family, house, etc, etc comes that much later.
Eventually (already?) it can put an entire area, city, region, or generation on a lower trajectory for their lives, negatively affecting everyone.
That is what concerns me.
And even that 4% content has no logic, just trying to deceive readers using lots of confusing/dubious expressions.
"Since then I’ve gotten a college degree, come within striking distance of finishing grad school, and acquired a number of practical and social skills I simply didn’t have as a teenager."
> So basically if you trim it down it means "I became and adult and went to college". (I had to re-read to realize "come within striking distance of finishing grad school" means nothing. "Acquired a number of ..." also means nothing because that's the definition of growing up. I acquired number of practical and social skills too. And so did everyone else.)
As for the content itself, this person needs to learn a lot more than some esoteric economics theory books and some blog posts about startups, before criticizing how startups work. It's all based on shallow understanding of how things work.
Fortunately, mathematicians managed to reject the rhetorical approach to truth-finding. Will the rest of us follow?
We don't need "Zero point energy", we need a more efficient form of energy compared to Fossil Fuels which have been the driver of the economy. It's quite likely that leaps in Solar, Battery and Nuclear will allow us to "upgrade" civilization.
Energy is also only one part of the society/economy, the other part is cognitive/computation. The emergence of networked world along with AI and Sensing, will provide civilization with another leap in terms of efficiency.
The idea that "if there was something to be discovered (or businesses that would need to be started), it would have been already discovered" is completely wrong. Rather technological inventions allow us to build more efficient system that would not have been previously feasible.
This article reminds me of the socialists who despise Green Revolution, claiming it was a "Technological Solution" to problem of hunger (and inequality) in India, etc. and would rather have preferred mass revolutions and social change with "equitable" distribution. All the while enjoying privileges that come with living in a developed country.
Category error, fossil fuels are already 100% efficient.
Any fuel is.
This is what I referred to.
You can invest the same amount of money into 100 startups, or 10,000 mom&dad shops. Which choice is better depends, among other things, on big can such a startup get. And in todays connected world, it's possible to scale to levels unthinkable just a few decades prior — and bring more value to humanity as a whole while you're at it. 100 years ago, mom&dad option would've been the most beneficial to society and the most rational from economic perspective — now its the startup one.
"If it were apparent what businesses need started already, they’d be started already. "
(while recognizing my white male privilege)