santiagogo

It just shows how bad of a person she is. She is having kids because _she_ wants to have them, even though she knows it will hard for them growing up. Putting herself before her kids even before they are born is pretty shitty parenting.

The fun and, the status and the power come from controlling wealth to build or do things. As soon as you limit control, it stops being fun and they stop generating value.

If you think 100 million dollar houses are egregious, you could try to make building them illegal. But then they'll just buy one in another country, or a yacht, or something similar.

A lot of this is why capitalism works.

As an ex-smoker I think the same and that's what actually made it harder to quit for me.

Smoking forces you to find open air spaces, is relaxing and induces slow breathing. In some ways it's a form of meditation. Other times it forces social spaces with other smokers in which you have to ask for a ligher and you have a conversation starter.

A nice practice with a terrible health outcome.

Same here. Rushed to the hospital after two nights of not sleeping from the back pain and chills at end of Feb. First time I've ever taken an injection for pain relief.

Number of hours worked is not equal to production or richness of a society.

Productivity equals production.

A small team of engineers who design and create a machine to build brick walls en masse, could have the same productivity as hundreds of thousands of bricklayers working 16 hours a day.

A good example of this are Silicon valley, Singapore or New York, which are small social groups that have more economic and social output than most countries with a much larger population.

To be more productive and have a richer and better quality of life (richer is not necessarily more quality of life), it's generally more efficient and sustainable to have better education and social conditions for workers, than to exploit them.

Honestly I don’t think he cares/understands that much, but he’s pretty excited about the coworking trend in general and thinks it’s not going away.

I know one landlord who rented several buildings to them and he understands the risks perfectly, but says the price per sq/ft he's getting paid is so good that even if they blow up within 3 years it's still a great deal.

To some extent wealth and the comfort you can buy with it does reduce dependence on others and can help someone become isolated, since you don’t need help or favors and don’t need to engage in reciprocal social activities, since you can just pay for things. It doesn’t necessarily cause isolation, but it definitely helps someone who intentionally or unintentionally want to become socially isolated.

My mom has done it with my help. From what I've seen, it's a bit more profitable than renting out directly, but also very time consuming (especially cleaning and housekeeping). If you factor in the time it takes to manage the Airbnb it probably isn't much more profitable than regular renting, unless you manage a large number of Airbnb's or have a large amount of free time and enjoy the whole hosting thing, like my mom who is retired and loves meeting tourists.

I would also add that the city and location probably influence the economics and profitability of it a lot.

We like the idea of technology improving our quality of life because as a civilization it's worked for us spectacularly so far. Driverless cars are appealing because they build on top of a transportation solution that already works, reducing the problems and externalities of it, without requiring us to completely overhaul the way we build cities and live which could take decades. When half of the world lives in remote or insecure areas, driving vs public transport is not a lazy lifestlye choice like eating poorly. Autonomous cars will also bring about a lot of new use cases which could improve public transport design, reach and usage, like driving you to a metro station which has no parking in the morning and picking you up in the afternoon.

I sell SAAS to banks. Here are some tips for selling to large CO's I've picked up in the process:

1. Get your foot in the door with a small deal. Try and close a small deal, sell them a pilot, a three month trial or sell a small component and then grow your way in. Closing a large deal from the start is close to impossible.

2. When you have an entry point, get several members of the management team on board. As BostonEnginerd mentions, demo and network to everyone you can and try and get them on board. Executives at large established CO's tend to be risk averse even if they have decision making power, so they will try to shield their decisions as part of a team evaluation result.

3. Be prepared for a very long sales cycle. Some of the best deals will take really, really long to close. Work on as many leads as possible so you don't get demoralized if one doesn't come out and keep emailing them even if you haven't heard from them in six months.

4. Be persistent. Even if they desperately need your product, sometimes large CO's are so bogged down in bureaucracy and day to day operations that it will take them a long time to fit you in their agendas.

5. Large CO's suffer from severe FOMO. Use this to your advantage, show them a competitor who is doing something similar. Even if it's a test 8 time zones away, this will definitely shake them up.

As for your product. A successful early warning system for disease should be easy to sell to a large health insurance company which could potentially save millions or billions from preventing insurance claims. It could also be possible to sell it to an established software vendor in the health care industry.

Which do you recommend? I work with custom solutions for banks which a lot of times include fraud prevention services from third parties, so I'm consistently benchmarking for better alternatives.

Metro Manila also felt very much like that when I was there (except for the crime). I wanted to leave almost as soon as I landed. He probably got some inspiration from his country's capital.