A few months back, I launched a side project that builds a professional profile from your daily todo list (www.komplish.com). The idea is you can use it to track side projects and even your tasks at work, and build a profile from that to help you find work. You can also find others through the app for smaller jobs that may not be big enough for a full time job posting. I’d love it if anyone wanted to give it a try and let me know your thoughts! Hopefully it can be helpful to some!
It's always a good idea to be skeptical of someone making claims you need lots of capital to rapidly scale your business when that person is selling capital for a living.
I'd make the follow small modification to the parent's quote:
I's always a good idea to be skeptical of someone making claims you should raise lots of capital to rapidly scale your business today or in the near term, as opposed to other strategic alternatives when that person is selling capital for a living.
I really wish discussions about how regulations protect the consumer didn’t start with the assumption that there was no better option than government regulation to afford that same protection.
> the assumption that there was no better option than government regulation to afford that same protection.
What other options are there? Letting the market "solve it" is not an option because the incentives are not aligned and market actors are not rational.
In addition, it is worth understanding that it is not sufficient for most market actors to be rational. Because even if you have a single irrational actor, game theory takes over and everyone starts acting irrationally in an effort to not get crushed.
That doesn't make sense to me. If an "irrational" strategy, applied by an individual, can beat the market, that strategy is in fact rational. What you may be referring to is Brad De Long's "The Economic Consequences of Noise Traders" [1], which seeks to create a model to explain why "the market can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent". Note, though, even in De Long's paper, it's never a single "irrational" investor driving rational investors out of business. Instead, there are large number of noise traders, whose random trading patterns cause markets to fluctuate wildly, depleting the capital stocks of the rational investors, and driving them from the market. The result is entirely dependent on the rational investors having less capital than the noise traders, which certainly wouldn't be the case in a market full of rational investors, with one noise trader.
That only works if you assume that "rational" means "make as much as money as possible in the shortest possible time while ignoring any externalities."
Labelling that kind of behaviour as rational is a neat rhetorical trick. But by any objective standard of ethics - or even realistic expectations of medium-to-long-term survivability - it doesn't meet any of the standards required for rational action, any more than any other hoarding behaviour does.
And there's the post-financial view that the real benchmark for rationality isn't competitive acquisition but maximisation of personal and collective opportunity - which is something that markets consistently fail at. (Although again the stock rhetoric claims otherwise - typically with selective interpretation of the available evidence.)
I think Uber vs the SF taxi commission is one such example.
Regulations on taxis were sold as a public safety measure but the regulators became captured by the industry.
Uber and Lyft sidestepped the regulations and prices went down, service improved dramatically, and there was no reduction in safety. (In fact, it’s likely drunk driving has gone down and improved public safety.)
In this instance, private industry is currently a better regulator than the regulators were.
> Uber and Lyft sidestepped the regulations and prices went down, service improved dramatically
Technically neither of those is a failure of regulation, those are side effects of regulation.
Uber and Lyft removed transparency of costs beyond knowing the cost of your trip for instance which isn't a benefit.
In fact I can't think of much that is related to regulation that they do better beyond being good enough for now by most metrics that people care about. Of course if that changes in the future nothing can be done.
I am fine with Uber and Lyft existing and I do agree that taxis had in some places made themselves into a nuisance but I don't know that those companies did a better job as much as they just ignored all those problems and assumed they weren't important.
> I am fine with Uber and Lyft existing and I do agree that taxis had in some places made themselves into a nuisance but I don't know that those companies did a better job as much as they just ignored all those problems and assumed they weren't important.
Please, the taxi companies have been decimated world wide. Its absolutely clear that people are way happier working and consuming Lyft/Uber services.
This is a good example, but: have you ever dealt with airport car ride hustlers? This is what the alternative to taxi regulations looked like before smartphones enabled solutions like Uber.
Furthermore: Is there a general principle here that can be applied across a range of situations as a better alternative to government regulations?
It's not easy to see in the moment, and sometimes an individual's options are limited (though this seems rare for senior devs), but why would anyone want to continue to create value for someone who holds biases against them that are hidden as not being a 'cultural fit'?
At one point, there was talk of the industry moving to a pay per hour of horsepower model or something similar where you are basically paying for guaranteed uptime. I don't know if there is still an effort to move towards that or not, but that would change this discussion quite a bit.
Just a little supporting fact most people wouldn't be aware of, when you're buying a used tractor the "odometer" you look at isn't in miles but hours which is tracked in the same way.
