People who beg for power will always be dependent on someone else to hold on to it. If you are begging for it you are on the wrong path. Doesn't matter what the gender is.
No need to make them cofounders. Take a loan for N months and pay them (or someone more skilled). Recover the amount when you fund raise. If you get to a decent prototype state, recovering cost of employing 1-2 devs is not too complicated.
thanks for the reply. I'm pretty set on wanting at least one other co-founder so I have someone to "go to war with" so to speak, but I see your point in not forcing that relationship, especially not when this specific issue could just be hired out.
pfft people who want to find a way around what anyone "allows" will do so. To desperate people rules dont matter.
There are more than 50 countries right now standing with begging bowls outside the IMF cause their economies have no hope of growing without help. As long as that list has no hope of shrinking, people who live there and recognize that reality, are going to find ways to get out by hook or crook.
Immigration is a symptom of growing global inequality. Without inequality reducing no rules or walls are going to stop the incoming waves.
Google Sharon Zukin. She wrote a book on loft living and describes the decline-rejuvination cycles in cities. According to her poor artists are the reason for those million dollar valuations.
Cycle goes something like this. Factories in parts of the city shut down after it get cheaper to run them outside. Those spaces lay empty, rents drop, decay begins. Poor Artists move in. Area starts getting interesting. Yuppies move in cuz of the 'cool' factor. Property developers notice. They start buying everything up. Rents jump. Artists get kicked out. And you end up with boring rich people living in a formally cool area.
Ha, never thought I'd see Sharon Zukin referenced on HN.
"Loft Living" is a great book, although it's been a minute since I read it. To quibble on a minor point -- if I remember correctly, a major part of that book was pushing back on the narrative on part of that cycle, that these factory spaces "lay empty".
Something she describes in this book is that these factory spaces were still very much in use by light manufacturers, and that it was the rich real estate interest specifically targetting this area for redevelopment that pushed a narrative that it "lay empty" so that they could more easily get the neighborhood rezoned and push out the manufacturers for more lucrative residential tenants.
Saying Zuck et al knew what they were doing is misleading, and gives them too much credit. They are no experts in how dopamine works.
Tech makes it easy to build things quick. Some things gets popular more by accident than design. Zuck didn't build insta, or whatsapp or tiktok. The reasons for popularity and what is working is generally discovered post facto.
Popularity attracted funding. Things scale up (scale is the only thing tech brings to the table). That attracts financial engineers of Wall St. They take over and control how firms are managed. Cuz most creatives, engineers and scientists have no training in finance or business. And that sets up where the story goes.
The financial engineers aren't programmed to design goods or improve quality of life. They are programmed to capture market, as quickly as possible and collect rent from as much of the market as possible, getting the cheapest rates on interest/labor/forex/tax etc.
Market capture tactics increasing rely not on product, or quality of product, but on arbitrage capability, taking out competition AND outspending the competition in Marketing/Advertising/PR (ie Demand Engineering). Demand engineering works cause people have finite Attention bandwidth. As long you get your signalling and messaging into that finite bandwidth you win over the people who cant.
The technologist, the financial engineer, the demand engineer are all furiously optimizing what they are individually good at.
When they come together we end up with a very efficient corporate machine. When a whole herd of these machines, all copying each others behavior, run around the individual human being has less and less control over their own environment.
The machine herd will capture your kids in some other way if you get them off smartphones and social media. The only solution is to change the behavior of the machine and the herd.
The problem is not info or misinfo but scarcity of attention.
Herbert Simon in 1971 - In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the Attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of Attention and a need to allocate that Attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.
The current global attention allocation system is biased towards the biggest attentions craving characters on the planet And those who can buy the most ads.
> The current global attention allocation system is biased towards the biggest attentions craving characters on the planet And those who can buy the most ads.
Would it not be more accurate to say it's misallocation of attention, rather than a scarcity? That is, even if we had more attention to give, we should avoid dedicating as much as we do to those who can buy the most ads
It is scarce in the sense Attention doesn't grow. As in there is an upper limit to how many things you can pay attention too, and how much free time you have to pay attention. But Info is growing all the time. Which also means the number of things you can't pay attention too is growing.
The UN report on the Attention Economy quotes a study that says 0.5% of content generated is consumed by people. And that number was from 2015 and keeps falling.
As networks grow, more connections happen, and as tools of content generation/distribution/broadcast gets cheaper or free, Info keeps exploding. But Attention available does not grow.
So this creates a problem for 2 groups - those who want the Attention of others (eg corporations/politicians/influencors etc) and those who are having a hard time working out what info to pay attention too.
The global attention allocation system is designed for the first cause they are willing to pay to capture finite available global attention.
The second group is mostly left to fend for themselves against extremely sophisticated systems designed to capture, buy and sell their attention or sometimes even steal it.
