Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0x8BADF00D | Hacker News Reader

> And yes, investing in a useless startup is not real investing; it's consumption; the real purpose of most startups is to bring pleasure to a rich person and their friends when the startup gets acquired, not to serve society.

And yet it is the very same startups that have improved your standard of living exponentially where luxuries reserved for the rich like private chauffeur (Uber/Lyft), matchmaking (Tinder/OkCupid), and private island vacations (Airbnb) are accessible to normal people.

Wealth is not a zero-sum game. In fact, I can prove this to you right now. Go look at the consumer price index during the end of WW2 era up until the gold standard was abolished. Compare it to today's CPI. It's not the "rich" who are evil, it is central banking by fiat which is the real evil.

View on HN

Except that I don't care about Uber, Tinder, or AirBnb. I would happily pay more for regular Taxi and regular Hotels if only I could afford what I really want; to live in my own house in a place I actually want to live in. Now because of the job market, I am forced to live to a big city where all the rich people have their toy startups and houses are too expensive.

As a software engineer, I'm just an entertainer for rich people. I wish they would just give me the money for free so that I could create real value working on my open source projects.

> As a software engineer, I'm just an entertainer for rich people. I wish they would just give me the money for free so that I could create real value working on my open source projects.

That's due to regulatory capture and a high tax rate due to excessive regulation. There is a book I highly recommend that you read. It is called "The Kingdom of Moltz" by Irwin Schiff, a bonafide political prisoner in the United States who died for his beliefs. When you read this book, you'll realize that crony capitalism and fiat central banking has sacrificed the well-being of the vast majority of US citizens.

>As a software engineer, I'm just an entertainer for rich people.

What do you mean by this?

There is a better argument than yours imo.

If we diverted the funding and manpower in Uber into public transportation... what happens? If we provided more affordable housing/tourist accommodations such that people did not _need_ to rent out their places in AirBnB, what happens?

The Tinder problem/solution is a weird one. It's in itself both and harmful and beneficial.

You're kind of missing the point. The examples you give aren't useless. The vast majority are useless and die without achieving anything or are pointless financial engineering like ICOs.

Of course ICOs are scams and I would agree that most start-ups are probably useless and doomed to fail. But to find the small portion of companies that turn out to work well, it makes sense to put money into many companies. That's the VC principle.

I don't see how ICOs are less of a financial scheme/scam than the Silicon Valley VC Startup acquisition funnel.

Just looking at Google alone, the number of startups which were acquihired and whose product was subsequently shut down is significant.

> standard of living exponentially where luxuries reserved for the rich like private chauffeur (Uber/Lyft), matchmaking (Tinder/OkCupid), and private island vacations (Airbnb) are accessible to normal people.

Uber is, from client's perpective, just a taxi service with ability to hails cabs through an app. Matchmaking services were available and cheap way before the Internet. As for private island vacations available for normal people via Airbnb - can you point me to one airbnb offer like that?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com