trysomething

Nature has endowed mankind with diverse faculties, fallible reason and variable fortune, and so in a free society there will by necessity be "winners" and "losers".

Those of you who reflexively oppose gentrification ought to consider what type of society you want to live in. Do you believe that individuals have the right to make decisions that could affect their own lives beneficially or adversely? One such decision is to rent or buy property.

There are clearly potential benefits and drawbacks to either choice. I may value stability of residence and the chance my chosen property will appreciate, and therefore choose to buy, and so put capital down and strain my credit. Alternatively, I may want to bootstrap a small business or startup using the same capital and credit, and therefore choose to rent.

When, in the name of stopping the "evil" of gentrification, you propose to severely restrict what a property owner can do, such as through rent control, you are also proposing to restrict the original choice to rent or buy. You are thus limiting the opportunity of the less fortunate to buy when and where the price is low and sell if and when the price gets high.

In the name of protecting the vulnerable, you prevent them from advancing to a better station in life. It's very easy to consider the benefits of laws and regulation while ignoring the costs.

Frankly there is no need to keep beating the drum about these startups. This is at least the 4th article about the parking apps on HN's front page in the last couple weeks. It's also been on TV.

This is not not deeply interesting anymore, and as such I am flagging it. I hope others will do the same.

Today's tally: 9

It crossed the line quite a while back, but I'm not particularly interested in taking a principled stand here.

I'm just curious as to how they are doing this.

Not as far as I'm aware.

It might actually be great publicity. Watsi is awesome, but not well known amongst the general populace (who are probably far more likely to donate to dubious organizations like the "christian children's fund").

As Chase Adam said in his startup school speech, Watsi merely has to get people to look at it's patients' pictures and read their stories.

Even if this were true, even heavy pot smokers inhale far less plant material than your average cigarette smokers.

What we are seeing here brings to light an inconvenient truth: you simply cannot legislate away obnoxious social behavior. As long as I remember, Craigslist has prohibited discriminatory advertising to ensure listings comply with the fair housing act. Does this really stop a prejudiced landlord? When it gets down to the level of individuals dealing consensually with individuals, there isn't much that the state can do (unless it's a tyrannical state).

Black comedians have always joked about being passed over by cabs, well before Uber, Lyft etc. In the long run, I think these services actually improve things .. On the curb, all a racist cab driver sees is how someone looks .. but now everyone can develop a reputation that goes well beyond appearances. In addition, by taking care of payment, prejudiced drivers don't have to worry that some groups are less likely to pay at the end of the ride. Eventually, they will realize that the color of one's skin is a terrible predictor of character and (hopefully) become less racist.

So, the "sharing economy" is not itself racist, but due to its peer to peer nature it exposes the lingering prejudices in our Society. But, since prejudice requires a lack of reason or evidence, the sharing economy also provides a way forward. Through AirBnB, for example, we can not only see what someone looks like, but we get information about the content of their character. Granted, it's not perfect (nothing ever will be), but it's a start.

> salaries would likely fall without them

The median salary would likely fall, the mean would likely rise (or stay around the same) but the very top salaries would rise dramatically, in line with what these same players make on the free market as brand ambassadors.

This brings to light an uncomfortable truth: incentives are not really aligned for the very top talent and the majority of workers. To extend the sports analogy, Roger Federer recently opposed spreading prize money more equally in the grand slams, saying essentially that players should win more to get more money. (right now tennis prize money is essentially a power law distribution).

1. Absolutely, they do target these people, particularly through internships which are essentially recruiting tools. The BigCo advantage is that any decent salary will seem like a lot to people who've never had one before.

However, they are not the only players in the game, particularly recently. Y-Combinator itself started as a recognition of this paradox: while recent grads may be "struggling" to make rent (and in need of income), they are good at struggling (scrappy, risk-tolerant etc) and therefore ideally suited to starting a startup.

That said, I believe this particular lawsuit is more relevant to "proven" talent than students.

2. I think "hackers" will generally retain the "hacker" ethos, which I don't think is particularly tied to how they behave as founders or executives. I don't see "hackers" as any more or less benevolent or idealistic than the general population in the long run. In the short run, however, they are more likely to feel empathy since they were in the same shoes as their early employees more recently. From a more pragmatic standpoint, they realize more acutely that it will take a lot to get the best people to stay and contribute to someone else's dream.

Finally until they are formidable enough to engage in strategic discourse with the likes of Google and Apple, they don't have the ability to attempt such collusion.

3. Perhaps, but not necessarily. Acquihires might be a particularly good tool for talent discovery. There's also the potential threat that acquihires represent (if you treat us (engineers) too badly we'll just leave and you will have to buy us back 10x).

Your argument here is a good one, acquihires may reduce information available to all parties. However, this information asymmetry may work against the acquirer more than the acquired (or vice versa). I don't think there is enough data to confirm either possibility.

4. It depends on what you mean by compensation. In many cases (not all), the work may be more interesting and more importantly you (may) have more freedom in choosing what to work on. I qualify these statements because to get all the way to this utopia you need to get tenure, which is hard.

Regardless, you get to work with the best and most interesting people, which is a form of compensation. Also, plenty of startups come out of academia simply because it's like an extension of student life* (particularly grad students, post-docs and other non-tenured people).

* discussed in #1

This conduct is obviously despicable, though certainly not out-of-character for Steve Jobs (all due respect for his talents). However, I generally believe this will resolve (and has been resolving) itself via market mechanisms. The mistaken assumption is that the only competition here is between Apple, Google etc and that it is focused primarily on income.

The market is a lot more subtle than that:

  1. Hackers are not simply mercenaries, esp. the best. 
  2. A decent % of the best are involved in startups, either as  founders or early hires. 
  3. "Acquihires" are a mechanism for the best engineers to get paid more "outside" the system. 
  4. Aside from industry, there is competition from academia etc.

They could be, it's all relative of course. The most affected engineers in this case were likely the cream of the crop. It's in a way analogous to professional sports, where (if salaries were truly unrestricted) the very top players could easily demand a multiple of their already astronomical salaries. To combat this, some leagues like the NBA have 'salary caps' and 'maximum contracts'. You won't see the government going after this extremely obvious anti-worker collusion because there isn't much sympathy for multi-millionaire athletes. However, salaries for the best are almost certainly artificially low.

In a larger sense, argument isn't about what the affected workers "should" be paid, it's about who gets to decide: the potential recruits or their prospective employers.

As someone who believes that free markets generally "find a way" (in spite of information asymmetry), I'm hesitant to endorse the government's view point. One good thing that can come of this is more of these top-notch engineers get fed up with this sort of behaviour and start more startups. At the same time, I'm not going to shed any tears for Apple or Google if they lose in the courts.