I work from home, live in SF, travel often, and make more here than anywhere else and put more away even with insane prices. But I also sell software development services, so not really a better place to be.
Even if I didn't, I would never leave because of the weather and activities.
Not the same situation being discussed, but I'm glad you've found your way there. This is more to do with the hordes that commute daily, and grind it out. Working from home, with your own company, is a completely different story.
There's no innate human right to freedom of movement within other societies.
Humans are individuals, individuals form into groups, and those groups when large and cohesive enough form into societies, civilizations, and now nation states. If those groups are to exist as a "group" they require these shared norms, values, culture to remain a viable group. If part of that culture is to exclude outsiders on the area of land on this earth that they control, then who is one individual or many individuals to say that this is invalid?
This presents a lot of opportunity for places like the United States where immigration and freedom of movement is more accepted - so you get more immigration and more growth. But that is something citizens of the US have decided, not external actors.
> There's no innate human right to freedom of movement within other societies.
Sure there is, at least if you acknowledge the notion of human rights in the first place. (There's no "innate human right" to not be tortured.)
Without governments, there is no impedance to freedom of movement. This isn't merely theoretical: as governments have become stronger and their reach extended across the globe, the ability to move freely has correspondingly decreased.
I don't think "human right" means what you think it does. Before governments, anybody could straight up murder anyone else, as long as they were ruthless enough to also murder anyone who might want to avenge the deceased. The world was a viscious place ruled by the strong, with no guarantees of anything. "Human rights" are something that didn't exist in the state of nature but were invented afterwards.
> I don't think "human right" means what you think it does.
This is a rude way of approaching a discussion. Don't make my assumptions about my knowledge.
A much better way of starting a discussion would be to state what you believe the definition of a human right is. There are in fact many different philosophical views on what human rights are, with many philosophers in fact arguing that their origin is in natural rights. [0]
> "Human rights" are something that didn't exist in the state of nature but were invented afterwards.
That's pretty much what is implied by my first line:
> Sure there is, at least if you acknowledge the notion of human rights in the first place. (There's no "innate human right" to not be tortured.)
I don't disagree with many of your points, but I think perhaps what is missing is perspective. Playing a bit of devil's advocate:
> I think that what's lacking in the american system is the recognition of "normal" entrepreneurs, those making $200 dollars at a time, and growing their high-potential tech-product business from $0 to $1M in 5 years
This doesn't move the needle in the biggest economy in the world. That's not even a viable business in most cities with high cost of living. At that rate you probably wouldn't even be able to pay yourself a decent wage, let alone hire anyone, within the first 2-3 years. Why would the United States want to let you in where there are more promising businesses/entrepreneurs on the path to $100m/year companies within 5 years?
> Why would the United States want to let you in where there are more promising businesses/entrepreneurs on the path to $100m/year companies within 5 years?
Blatant false dichotomy. Nothing prevents the US from admitting both.
I didn't say only admit people that are already running large companies, though those are welcome as well.
I said "on the path to 100m in 5 years"
That could be $0 through year 1-3, but it would be wholly different if that company was a technology startup creating value vs a services business like a non-chain Mexican restaurant mentioned below that is not necessarily creating an outsized impact on the US economy with low wage service jobs.
Apple was incorporated and immediately had $250,000 in capital invested. Me thinks you did not read the wiki page.
> During the first five years of operations revenues grew exponentially, doubling about every four months. Between September 1977 and September 1980 yearly sales grew from $775,000 to $118m, an average annual growth rate of 533%.
Did Facebook know that they will be worth 100s of billions when they started. Neither did Google.
Anyone who is net positive on the welfare system should be welcome to US. Even a company which makes a million dollar profit per year in 5 Years should be welcome.
Exactly. Jessica Livingston mentioned in a video, many founders don't know for sure where things are headed in the beginning. It's hard to picture you are going to be a billion dollar company when you are starting.
Anyone who can create a startup should be allowed as long as they can pay themselves and their employees. If they employ more than 5 citizens/green card holders who are more than 50% of employees and have more than 0 profit for 3 years give them a green card. These company should build products and not provide services.
You gotta start somewhere. Right now the situation is an utter clusterf*!
And if an Entrepreneur who is moving to US can't pay for food and lodging to himself and his employees - how are they gonna survive.
On the other hand, it matters how many people are involved in the operation. A small two or three-person tech startup making a million dollars is different from a restaurant with thirty (? estimate) employees making a million dollars.
Is that an accurate comparison? Gates was born into weatlh and a pre-existing social network. His company's success has a foundation of winning the genetic lottery.
It's reasonably accurate. IMO, MS grew because of DOS.
They were hoping Gary Kildall's C/PM would be the OS for the IBM PC, and only leveraged DOS "to save the language business."
It's not clear how much of a factor Gates' parents' wealth and social network was in this process. Yeah, his Mom was on the board of IBM but Microsoft was an established brand already.
His company didn't spring into being without a history. He had access to educational and tutoring resources, specifically technology related resources, his entire life. I'd say it's very clear his parents' circumstances were a huge factor in his early successes, and arguably much more important than those successes were to later ones.
There are millions of people who are equally as lucky as Bill Gates in terms of family economic and social status. Luck plays a role but it is not the defining factor.
"Millions?" How do you figure? Gates was born well into the top 1%. Tens or hundreds of thousands is more accurate. Luck isn't the deciding factor, especially in what endeavors to pursue, but it is a prominent factor in the success of those endeavors.
Let's say you are right that he was born into the top 1% in the US. I am not confident that is true without data but let's say that is it for the sake of argument.
.01 * 330,000,000 = 3,300,000
So yes, millions. And yet there are only a handful of Americans like Bill Gates.
It's usually not easy to compare across industries, though. A software company with $1M revenue could easily end up with higher net profit than a restaurant with $3M revenue.
True, or work out a DND schedule, so that notifs get to you only on certain periods of time. Thing is, this won't "batch" the notifications, it will just shut them up for the period where you're in DND mode, you'll need to check notifications center afterwards or go through all the badged apps to figure out what happened in the meantime.
Carry your own food and enough batteries to last to the destination. Or have a hot swap battery bot like a military jet re-fueler. No stopping at all!
In all seriousness, I'm not saying there won't be stop offs and rest stops (because really, who wants to be in a moving box for 3 days), but in terms of feasibility I can definitely theorize a situation where stopping is no longer necessary.
I just finished a road trip and man, would an auto-RV have been amazing. Instead of only catching ~50% of the view because I was the driver, I could take it all in and interact with my lady at the same time vs focused on driving. Growing up I thought RVs were crazy awful - but now I look forward to my auto-RV at age 75 driving my old ass around the country.
a) The amount is nice since I think they apparently approached them after figuring out how to do this. So impossible to think anywhere near that amount of work was actually involved.
b) Establish and prove they can do the job. Will get other work like this and be able to charge more. Really no different than what the local handyman or plumber does in some cases.
Also important to note, that Uber does a few things exceptionally well that most other "Uber for X" companies fail with at least one or more:
1) Dramatically increase convenience / quality of service
2) Lower or comparable costs to alternative (esp UberX vs Taxi and vs your own car)
3) Have a demo-able product. Viral word of mouth is so simple when you can literally take your friend for a ride.
Most other on-demand services fail at one of these. Spoon rocket in your example, first started as a more expensive convenience play, then as they tried to scale up, lowered quality (violating #1) in order to compete on price (#2). This is why I stopped using them and also why I don't use their competitors like Sprig and Munchery, just too expensive for what it is.
Uber/AirBnB just straight up ignored laws regulating their industry. They bet that regulators wouldn't crack down too hard and they were right. But not every industry is regulated like taxis/hotels. Imagine a food startup that violates health and cleanliness regulations, or a finance startup that ignores the SEC.
I think the food startup equivalent to Uber would be people preparing meals in private homes/kitchens: There's certainly regulation around commercial kitchens, but it's not obviously bad if a home kitchen is used to prepare a meal: I do that all the time for my friends. But there's a lot of things that can go wrong in a home kitchen too as they don't have a lot of the normal commercial food storage stuff like a blast chiller, so I think that type of startup would definitely invigorate the same kind of regulation fight Uber did.
I was thinking about this recently. A friend of mine started selling cupcakes and made a website to do it. I don't really know what it takes for Little Debbie to get a new product approved but I would assume some regulatory body has to be appeased before they start selling. I can't imagine my friend went through any of that. If anyone knows about the regulations in this area, I'd love to hear. I'll dig around and report back if I find anything of note.
Not disagreeing with you, but to expand on your point: the type of regulation that Uber is ignoring is easier to ignore because it doesn't impact the customer. If you ignore the health regulations at your diner, you're sure as shit going to alienate a good portion of your potential customers because in addition to being illegal, an unclean restaurant isn't desirable.
But what Uber did was notice that due to regulation, the taxi drivers were receiving wage X, while there existed a lot of people that would be more than happy to do the same job for less than X. Find some loophole in the legislated price floor that allows you to employ that section of the supply curve and you've got a big profit opportunity. You can't cut corners in an existing, fairly efficient market, and call it the same thing.
Even if I didn't, I would never leave because of the weather and activities.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ to each their own.