Hedge Fund Manager: Goodbye and Good Luck
portfolio.com
portfolio.com
Not that I don't agree with it, but weird seeing that, I guess that guy is a hippie finance nerd. (I mean that in the best way possible).
What's odd is that he would use Linux as a metaphor, who but a hacker would get that?
What many people on HN consider common sense (e.g. Open ID, use complete sentences, use simple design for consumer sites) is not common sense to the general public (e.g. MOM, USE GMAIL INSTEAD OF HOTMAIL - CHRIST).
Gmail is not for moms I think.
is it weird that it was? he's clearly a very intelligent and accomplished man ..
The only thing that motivates me in my professional life more than money is history. I would like to be remembered. I would like a student of history to read about me in 100 years and think that I left this place better than I found it.
Alas, this motivation doesn't stick well in my head, and the money is always there for the taking.
I like his point that people simply earning money will not be remembered. He's made his money, and he's OK without being remembered. He can now relax (Which by the way, is why money is such a high motivating factor for me, personally. I don't particularly love the sight of money, but I believe it can buy peace of mind.)
I have often though that if we ever do want a society based on merit and humanity, we need to get control of runaway egos. Maybe this requires a gene modification, so maybe we are too many years from it. Who knows. I would love to locate and find remedy for the "asshole gene".
One of my great fears would be having complete strangers (not founders, not YCers, not HNers) regularly recognize me. Starting your own business, no matter what it is, certainly causes some loss of privacy, but I'd prefer that 100 years from now no one gives a shit about who I was or what I did. Because if they did, it more than likely means I did something wrong.
there are two ways to go about this. One is to have a society that allows you to feel secure in that you will always be able to have an income stream that enables high quality of life. The second is to gather enough FU money so you can provide for yourself without regard to what the rest of society does.
The second route is what most have been doing. And for good reason; that's mostly all our society allows, there are few occupations or opportunity for taking the high road. The trouble is this route doesn't "scale" as a solution for everyone. This route is "get out of my way, I'm taking care of myself, family, and friends. This requires you grab a bunch of equity. And that's the part that doesn't scale to everyone and therefore not a sustainable model.
"We don't take steps to redress inequalities of looks, friends, or sex life. We don't grab a kidney from you to save someone's life, even though that health difference was unfair brute luck. Redistribution of wealth has some role in maintaining a stable democracy and preventing starvation. But the power of wealth redistribution to produce net value is quite limited. The power of wealth creation to produce net value is extraordinary. Most of America's poor are already among the best-off of all humans in world history. We should be putting our resources, including our advocacy and our intellectual resources, into wealth creation as much as we can." -Tyler Cowen
Creating wealth is not a zero sum game, but... because noone can be certain of the proper amount of FU money one needs, you overreach (I don't mean "you" you, I mean anyone). It is precisely this that creates hordes of wealth "locked up". This is a highly inefficient model and does not scale to "all" people. You reach a point very quickly where maybe less than 20% can participate before you create inflation and devalue the equity, which in turn makes people raise their "FU quotient".
It creates a culture of continual acquisition of wealth due to the fear that not to do so means your relative wealth will decline. But what if everyone slows down? What if you can follow a well understood path to financial security that did not rob you of your life as a youth or your life as a parent or of your life as a spouse?
I'm not saying you or anyone else is a bad person for pursuing wealth. I am saying the model we have in which to do so is flawed. Most of us are aware it is flawed but don't bother to describe or attempt to fix it as there appears to be no alternate solution (i.e. we only live in one economy, we don't get to go hang out in a different one if we find the one we're in unappealing or flawed).
My hypothesis is that the only/best timing for creating alternate solutions is in harsh times. Times when people are hurting and willing to open their minds to new things. After all, this is the original secret of any entrepreneur: "find someone who is hurting, he'll take a chance on a tiny company he's never heard of." I think the same lessons apply to changing our local and global economy.
"The creator's concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite's concern is the conquest of men."
I don't necessarily associate fame (or celebrity) with being remembered. There are many great filmmakers or company founders who have left an important mark on history and have easily walked into a mall without getting recognized.
That is how I would like to be remembered. Being super famous in my own time would not be very cool at all.
I know this sounds like egomania, and maybe part of is that., but this is what it boils down to: I want to leave this world in a significantly better place than I found it. And I'd like that legacy to last for a while.
(I had to avoid writing: "And I'd like people to know it". Wow, that does sound terrible. Maybe I need I do need to rethink that particular philosophy.)
Or, he didn't feel like exposing his wealth to the markets for a while. Let's see if he ever comes back.
2. I'm taking my ball and going home.
3. The sky is falling.
4. Y'all can have socialism. We'll call it "meritocracy".
5. Also, weed is kinda groovy.
*My suggestion is that this great man start and sponsor a forum for great minds to come together to create a new system of government that truly represents the common man's interest, while at the same time creating rewards great enough to attract the best and brightest minds to serve in government roles without having to rely on corruption to further their interests or lifestyles.
"Solve it how?"
"Details, schmetails. That's busywork for the little people, I'm an ideas man."
"What we have to do with Medicare is have a commission, of the smartest people in America come together, come up with recommendations, and then like the base closing commission idea we had, then we should have congress vote up or down"
Not to make this political, but why is it laughable when this guy says it, but not laughable when one of our 2 candidates for president says it?
I'm guessing he smokes a lot of weed.
If I remember correctly, socialists rile against "meritocracy" precisely because it veils the unfair "merit" of those who can afford private tutors (or prep schools).
I really wish I knew this earlier. For a significant part of my adolescence, even through part of college, I believed intelligence alone would prove your worth. Now, I feel like people think you're actually dumb if you don't have a list of major accomplishments in your wake; you tend to get that feeling when interviewing for a job.
Being born into money is somehow different from the others?
Wealth is a proxy for one of the other talents. Wealth has always played a role in our selection process. Smarts, at some point, lead to an accumulation of wealth. Wealth signals, a lot more often than not, good genetic material that was awarded in previous iterations. Wealth offers the carriers of this material a better chance at survival, even if the current generation has regressed to the no-good-frat-boy mean. And if the chances are not availed, wealth is squandered in a few generations.
The idea that the wealthy, but dumb get a free ride, ultimately jeopardizing the entire system is foolish. There will always be smart people around to either guide them and their finances for a percentage, or fleece them and penalize them for their ignorance.
Enron filtered aggressively for morons. A fat lot of good it did them. A society is only a larger collection of vested interests.
Furthermore, the fact that inherited wealth is a longstanding tradition isn't a qualitative judgment one way or another, post facto rationalizations notwithstanding. Not everything that's existed for a long time is necessarily some happy equilibrium that benefits all sides.
Observing that money is a proxy for many desirable traits, and helps, and has helped, in bettering survival chances is not social Darwinism. To assume that the unintelligent wealthy are somehow more lucky, and that morons must be filtered out is.
Inherited wealth is much a tradition in the same way gestating your young (outside of the womb) is. Happy equilibrium or not, that is the way culture and nature have co-transformed, and determining the causative reasons is not necessarily blind Darwinism.
Here's a statement: On average, the wealthy are smarter, prettier, and taller, than the not-wealthy. Do you disagree with that? Or do you agree, but attribute the correlation to happenstance?
The unintelligent wealthy are more lucky, because they don't have to struggle. The letter writer struggled his whole life doing things he appears not to enjoy very much to get into the right school, make the right deals, etc, so that he could retire and go live on a diamond-studded houseboat and smoke weed or whatever he's going to do with his life now. If he had been born extremely rich, he could have done what he's doing now from the start. If he had been born moderately rich or an Ivy League legacy, he could have done it with less difficulty.
>Here's a statement: On average, the wealthy are smarter, prettier, and taller, than the not-wealthy.
If you want to select for smarts, looks, or height, then select for smarts, looks, or height, not some proxy which will never be as good as direct measurement.
Yes, there is: wealth doesn't imply a greater number of offspring. Survival is a relatively low economic hurdle, as is raising and nurturing children. By asserting any real similarity, you're conflating survival with some modern concept of success.
Here's a statement: On average, the wealthy are smarter, prettier, and taller, than the not-wealthy. Do you disagree with that?
I agree that wealth is a social signal. It might even imply things that aren't immediately apparent (though you'll know someone is tall and attractive before you'll know they're rich, most of the time). But even the facile comparison of a peacock's feathers and a rich person's designer clothing doesn't really hold water in my mind. I think a lot of our evolutionary urges might be sublimated in our struggles for success, but that doesn't make them the same things.
It did in preindustrial times, which is to say for practically all of human history. I recently read a quite impressive study of birth records in a scandinavian country (forget which) that showed a significant difference in the number of surviving children of rich and poor women.
The children of the wealthy are also richer than the rest of the population. Would you dispute that?
It may be completely unfair that you are born super-capable but society does better when you get ahead in life because of it.
I agree, and say the same about being rich and providing capital to the smart, or passing it on to your own progeny who stand a relatively better chance of ending up with the "good, success determining, bouquet of traits.
If you're interested in the area, I'd ask Joshua Tauberer, razor.occams.info, who made http://govtrack.us/. He's really into it and I think could quickly give you a complete overview of what's been done and what hasn't.
http://www.gamepolitics.com/2008/10/01/game-biz-types-leanin...
You know, after spending years and years to get Spore out the door, I can understand why Will Wright would be fond of dinosaurs...
Close: opensecrets.org