I'm beginning to see how delusional it is to think you can make money by producing something useful or of value in people's lives. That's for lusers. Instead mess with the neural pathways of a large population such that they just give you their money.
I'm sure many of us feel this way but would you please not post unsubstantive rants to Hacker News? It leads reliably to lower-quality discussion, partly because it's so generic, and partly because rage gets the lower-quality juices flowing.
Unless you're straight-up stealing, you have to persuade people to hand over their money. The way you do that is by convincing them that what they're getting in return is valuable.
Unfortunately people tend make value assessments that I think are horrible, and that causes entire industries to pivot in ways I don't like. For example, I love Nintendo's $60 games that come with plenty of content and no microtransactions. I don't like "free" smartphone games that do the opposite.
However, huge numbers of people have determined that getting nickel-and-dimed with thousands of dollars in microtransactions is something that adds value to their lives. I certainly don't think I have any right to object to their conclusion, except in the way that I'm already objecting: by refusing to spend any money on microtransactions. It just stings a little that I'm quickly finding myself in the minority.
It sounds like you're going through something similar with respect to the cryptocurrency market.
That’s somewhat like a conclusion I came to about another field I am in, glassblowing. For a long time, I thought the idea was to become more skilled at the art, and that would make me
more sucessful… It turns out getting better at marketing is much more important, assuming the overall goal is to make money. Financially, mediocre glassblowers with excellent marketing do far better than excellent glassblowers with mediocre marketing.
marketing was born with competition, you need marketing, because you are not the only one good at what you do
marketing is anything and everything you do, to influence others, to achieve your objectives .. this does include the product design and features .. or in other words, the features you chose to include in your product
marketing is not bad, and is not a waste
marketing is not, in my opinion, more important than the skills required to create a product, but it is definitely very important ... because simply put, you are not the only "skilled" one in the market
Indeed, nothing bad about having marketing skill or excelling at it. Certain people can take average glass skill and, through marketing, networking` and product savvy, parlay it into greater fame and fortune than others - people who have been pounding at their craft for decades.
Building a brand is a skill many artists don't excel at. It requires similar people skills to being a salesman. Often they have to rely on dealers, gallery owners and store owners who have the people skills to do retail and wholesale more successfully. The situation is somewhat mirrored in tech with the schism between programmers and CEO/investor/founder type personalities.
In the niche I work in, some people got lucky and became 'famous' in a kind of underground video way on Instagram and Snapchat. These days it's starting to resemble a more traditional art market.
Caring solely about money often has the side effect of making others' lives better. Amazon gainfully employs over 500k [1] people, giving them means to put food on the table. Not saying that wouldn't happen without Amazon, but more job availability is always better than less. Bezos just became the richest man ever recorded [2].
Who is forcing them to work at Amazon? Their lives are clearly better working there than if Amazon had never existed. If conditions are so bad that these employees live in tents, why not quit and.... oh wait.... live in tents (now with less money).
Amazon presumably. Without Amazon they would be making a living wage at a mom&pop store, and we would all be paying more for lower quality products with less choice.
My, how the world was improved by ruthless optimization and margin squeezing, centralization of commerce and retail, concentration of wealth, buying of legislators, invasions of privacy, etc.
I mean, we have attempted (at least in part) to create a system where acting selfishly in pursuit of money forces you to create value for society. That's literally the intent of the idea of capitalism.
It's a good idea - people will act selfishly instinctively, so if you can align that to make it good, then everything works.
Of course, we know raw capitalism doesn't work (e.g: monopolies break it). So our systems have all sorts of hacks to try and fix it. The problem is that so many of the richest people just focus on breaking those fixes and finding gaps to exploit to avoid creating value for society.
Currently, a lot of the groups in power across the world are actively trying to make more of those gaps they can slip through, and remove the layers of fixes we have put in to support the people that are not helped by that simple system.
Yes, it's good for people to want to make money in a capitalist system, assuming the system is perfect and that there is no way to break it is to ignore reality.
> I mean, we have attempted (at least in part) to create a system where acting selfishly in pursuit of money forces you to create value for society. That's literally the intent of the idea of capitalism.
No, it's not; that's an after-the-fact rationalization.
I mean, we were a few centuries into the feudalism-capitalism transition before anyone started even talking about property rights in those terms in general, at least another century before capitalism as a system was even described (and by it's critics, not it's supporters), and I think several decades later till this excuse was cited specifically as a justification for capitalism as such.
Capitalism was created, incrementally over time, because rich merchants decided to use their wealth to force feudal overlords to cede progrrssively more power and influence to the rich merchants. Not as a manner to harness greed for the public good. Just as a matter of greed, pure and simple.
Yes, I'm talking about how we justify it now and why we continue to try to use it as our primary system. That is at the very least the sales pitch. I believe it's a sensible idea - trying to ignore or change human nature seems unlikely to work, trying to harness it and direct it seems viable, and works to at least some extent in our current system.
My point was that, while that may be the aim of the system, it's not inherent to it - you are backing up my point by saying that it was not always used that way.
>I mean, we have attempted (at least in part) to create a system where acting selfishly in pursuit of money forces you to create value for society. That's literally the intent of the idea of capitalism.
No that's completely false. Capitalism is the replacement (and logical continuation) of feudalism, after its collapse, as a system of social stratification. Saying that is trying to validate your thinking and ignoring the history of the matter.
I am talking about the idea as it exists now, not the historical thing. I accept that it didn't spring up as it stands, but the idea that it is a system to create the society we want is at the very least the current claim for why we use it. I believe it's a system that can be made to work well, given the right setup.
My point was that, while that may be the aim of the system, it's not inherent to it - you are backing up my point by saying that it was not always used that way. (You may argue it still doesn't, although I'd say it does at least to some extent).
You are making a big assumption which I don't think you can make which is ... that Amazon is the result of a person or people who solely care about money.
Life, which you so nobly serve, comes from destruction, disorder and chaos. Now take this empty glass. Here it is: peaceful, serene, boring. But if it is destroyed
[Pushes the glass off the table. It shatters on the floor, and several small machines come out to clean it up]
Look at all these little things! So busy now! Notice how each one is useful. A lovely ballet ensues, so full of form and color. Now, think about all those people that created them. Technicians, engineers, hundreds of people, who will be able to feed their children tonight, so those children can grow up big and strong and have little teeny children of their own, and so on and so forth. Thus, adding to the great chain of life. You see, father, by causing a little destruction, I am in fact encouraging life. In reality, you and I are in the same business.
I don't get it, either, especially with the Kodak news today. Like, someone please explain if I'm misunderstanding, but can't pretty much anyone create a cryptocurrency? Do I instantly become valuable if I create one tonight?
You can make anything seem valuable by bankrolling a sock puppet buyer to buy from you at a fantastical price while others are watching.
Cryptotokens work particularly well because of pseudonymity, a very receptive audience and exchanges that will happily provide a stage for just about anything as long as they get a little cut.
Competition between similarly inflated tokens make success and failure a matter of storytelling quality. The legend doesn't even have to personally convince anybody, but it should lend the sock puppet buys some plausibility.
It’s sad... a friend bought me ‘For Honor’ and it became almost immediately clear that it was a cheaply made Skinner Box. It was also clear that plenty of people were stuck in it.
I love games, but this emerging trend is boring, and worrying in equal measure. Games have shown so much positive potential, and I’ve been defending their value for a couple of decades at least. Now... I’m really worried, st least in the near-term, and I don’t know if I can still support them in the aggregate.
Or you can make money by issuing a new blockchain token and making it useful and add value to people's lives. People are obviously ascribing value to these things otherwise prices wouldn't be so high.
Separately, CMC delisting some Korean exchanges is actually probably a good thing since prices in Korean Won have been trending 20 to 30% higher than crypto assets priced in USD or EUR. It was creating a lot of weird market conditions. A correction in price isn't a bad thing.
When I first heard the term Initial Coin Offering last year, I laughed and thought "who would be so gullible as to just give someone their money?". Well...
It's just a way to finance a start-up. Sure most ICO's are scams, but surely there are a few gems. The way I see it, it's a way for a common man to become an angel investor. And just like with angel investing, most start-ups fail. But you could get lucky. Of course one should always do some research before investing. Figure out the history of the team members, check the source code commits if available, believe the use-case adds some real value, etc…
If I would join an ICO I would probably not spend more than a few hundreds of dollars on it. Something I wouldn't worry about losing.
The utility of bitcoin is that it's a global currency backed by an impartial computer system rather than a government. By being politically neutral it eases tensions and competition between countries. It makes commerce more efficient by taking national politics out of the heart of financial system.
