irrationalactor

Back when every person in the office required their own secretary to do the work that they now do with Saas, did you call secretaries rent-seekers?

Saas is productivity growth at work. Rent-seekers add no additional productivity to the economy, they diminish it. Saas is the opposite.

Are there individual examples where Saas companies might be providing negative value? Of course (I assume somebody will respond below with one such personal anecdote).

However, in aggregate, Saas is not rent-seeking.

Loving Mailbrew so far, but it's too half-baked at the moment for me to be willing to pay $10/month for it. For context, I happily pay for 1password, fastmail, workflowy, notion, stratechery, NYT, Spotify, blackblaze, 2 VPNs and countless other subscriptions so I am not your average cheap bastard on reddit.

It doesn't even support producthunt, indiehackers, designer news, etc. yet. I'd also love for the ability to scrape and detect updates to websites that don't actually have RSS feeds (no idea how to achieve that technically, but that is something I'd pay $10/month for).

I love Tailwind but hate having to deal with build tools and purgecss and package management and [insert modern workflow hassle] just for a little side project.

Is there anything similar to Tailwind that doesn't require any build process?

The sterile world you desire is not one I'd like to live in.

In fairness, all start-ups are "run like a circus." That's the point of a start-up--to figure out new/better ways of doing things. Most of the time it doesn't work, and then you try something else.

If you want the stability and reliability of Harvard, don't get your education from a scrappy upstart.

From the guide it sounded like you need a Finnish limited liability company to be able to service domestic Finnish clients.

Or would Finnish companies be able to pay an on-site freelancer with an American LLC just as easily?

Anybody have experience as to whether this applies to an American living in Finland?

Due to FATCA and the US's draconian tax laws around ownership of foreign investment assets...I'm wondering if it wouldn't make any sense to try to start a Finnish company while holding American citizenship. Assuming it would be a tax nightmare if you start producing any real income.

The problem isn't that you don't make your own toilet paper. It's that an oddly high percentage of people you're competing against for the most desirable jobs do make their own toilet paper.

By contrast, you appear less appealing as a result. If all you want to do is show up to the mill and get paid, stop applying at all the most prestigious mills. There's thousands of more humble mills that could use your help outside the valley--and they don't mind if you buy your toilet paper at the store.

Whatsapp's dominance everywhere outside the US has nothing to do with the generous texting plans here. These were common all over Europe as well. The reason the US has been slower to transition to data-based texting is due to our size and the rarity of Americans traveling internationally.

Imagine if every state in the US was a different country. That's basically Europe. Say you got charged roaming fees every time you traveled from New York to Connecticut. This was true in Europe until they passed regulation that mandated compatibility.

Wi-fi had no roaming upcharge. Hence why texting that works over wi-fi became the default.

Have you ever read about the history of the USSR?

If you include the millions who died in various famines as well as those that were executed directly by Stalin, the number of victims of the USSR has been estimated to be anywhere between 6 and 15 million people.

The Soviet Union has to be the worst counterpoint to anybody arguing against private enterprise.

Amazingly, none of these options are great.

Bookmark OS comes close for me, but the ugly UI ruins the experience. Nothing is more annoying than the Russian doll experience of seeing a hacky version of macOS doubled up inside of the chrome of your actual OS.

Love Raindrop in theory (design-wise they have the right idea), but I dumped it in practice due to the fact it's too bloated and buggy and runs much slower than just keeping my bookmarks on Safari.

Pinboard, while being minimalist which I love, is minimalist in the wrong way. The visual hierarchy is all over the place and impossible to decipher through. Scanning down a list of bookmarks is painful.

So I've largely just been using the standard bookmarks feature in safari--which is actually refreshing and awesome.

Except when I do that, I can't sync bookmarks to other browsers. I use Chrome on mobile and sometimes on desktop.

So back to the drawing board.

Why the hell are bookmarks so hard in 2019?

On the contrary, the idea the US government created this money from nothing is the backwards perspective. How does government deficit spending happen? Via the sale of debt (ie. Treasury bonds).

The reason people are willing to buy US government debt is because they are confident the US government will be able to pay them back, with interest. Why are people confident in the US government's ability to pay...and where does this money come from? The strength of the growing US economy and the money the government will derive from taxes on this growth.

Or conversely, let's look at what the US government spent that money on: supplying the war machine via US industrial capacity. That industrial capacity wasn't created out of thin air. Take a look at Detroit for example. Absent the existing industrial capacity enabled by the automotive industry, the allies would likely have not won the war.

Both the ability of the US government to deficit spend, and the things they spent that money on, were a direct result of the strength of the US's private enterprise.

That depends on your relative definition of "widespread." Was globalization widespread in 1919 compared to 1819? Absolutely.

But the globalization of our collective economies in 2019 is dramatically higher than it was in 1919.

Also, how was the US able to fund the massive buildup of arms and the Manhattan Project...which ultimately led to Pax Americana and MAD? By taxing the massive wealth generated by private enterprise.

Warfare is down even between nations who wouldn't fall under the definition of MAD (no nuclear weapons programs). How do you explain that if not for the aligned incentives created by a global economy?

Except, most companies make the world a better place. On the whole, private enterprise is almost entirely responsible for humanity's rise out of impoverished suffering over the past 200 years. The global interconnected nature of private enterprise is the reason we don't have as much warfare anymore, and why the world is safer than it's ever been in all of history.

I don't think Google's internal troubles are due to attracting people who want to "make a difference." I don't see employee activism getting out of hand at medical device companies where the products they make literally save lives. Nor do I see these same issues at non-profits.

Having worked in the field for a few years after graduation myself, I've come to think of "strategy consulting" as mostly bureaucratic arbitrage.

8 times out of 10, the organization knows exactly what needs to be done. However, big organizations have thousands of stakeholders with competing desires. Steering the ship in a different direction can have negative consequences for thousands of people.

Due to this problem...even the people in charge struggle to do what needs to be done without being pitchforked out of the place.

BCG, McKinsey, etc. provide the perfect cover. Their mythical brand image and powerpoint sales abilities allow management to do what needs to be done, while offloading the risk onto a 3rd party. If the changes don't work out, you can fire the consultants! The management was just following the advice of the outside experts.