If anything, people with a track record of amassing wealth should be treated with more suspicion on entering public service.
If all of their other decisions are geared toward increasing their wealth, one has to wonder whether the decision to enter public service is also geared toward increasing their own wealth.
People don't want to do their jobs, but that doesn't mean they're completely unmotivated. Many people with jobs they're indifferent to, also have hobbies they pursue relentlessly.
If you want people to take a deeper interest in their jobs, give them more money. Way more money. Way, way more money. If you want people to pursue deeper understanding of their interests, give them more free time.
To the extent that "shallow knowledge" is a problem, I think it's likely because most people spend a lot of their time doing boring work for not-enough money.
Many of the people who lost more than they can afford to lose were naive, not greedy. I believe that's the author's main point.
The problem is that cryptocurrency purveyors have marketing budgets, and cryptocurrency skeptics do not. It's difficult for people to get the message that cryptocurrencies are a scam when the promoters are running superbowl advertisements, and the detractors can only comment on the internet.
I find that terseness has a real downside when debugging code. If you need to get down to the level of what is actually executing, having to unpack all that compact code involves many more things than I can keep in my short-term memory.
Compactness is great for things that are true and work, but when there's a bug in there somewhere, terse code requires a lot of scribbling on paper.
> If your unit economics don't work then you're fucked...
From the company's perspective that's certainly true.
As a regular person I'm more worried about the companies whose unit economics work too well. Companies like Amazon have so much momentum that it seems like they could go on indefinitely, instead of eventually failing and making room for new entrants.
Companies whose unit economics don't work transfer wealth from investors to customers, then get out of the way. Companies that work too well can become an inescapable force.
> Whereas if we do actually do it, we might fail, which will be hard to take.
It's hard to take because unless you've already got substantial financial security, you may end up broke, and may no longer have any readily available "for-the-money" job opportunities afterward.
> 4. You're not up more than 1 week per 1-1.5 month.
That seems excessive if you're expected to be able to log into your work system within X minutes.
Having to be essentially home, near a computer, 25% of the time (1 week out of 4) is a pretty heavy burden, especially for people who prefer to be out, rather than home.
> if we looked in the opposite direction (where such light originates from) we would be seeing stars and galaxies at much more recent time (now)
If the preferred/non-preferred directions were "toward you" and "away from you", then rotating yourself to look in the "opposite direction" wouldn't make a difference.
> And the award for Most Condescending Comment goes to...
I probably could have phrased that better. In any case I don't think what we're saying is incompatible. One has no choice but to keep up with the cost of living. My point is that the cost of living in a massively "central" city is defined by a lot of people driven to succeed and be seen succeeding, whether or not that's the mentality of one's group of friends.
> There is no "displaying their success" or "keep winning bigger" mentality to be found
They may not realize the game they're in. But as long as the cost of living keeps hitting new peaks, inevitably people need to bring in more money, or move farther out or elsewhere. Supply is limited, and it is a competition.
People that want to be conspicuous have to display their success where it's going to be seen. Living in a place that is "central" in so many ways is a competition to see who can hang in there. The only way to stay is to keep winning bigger.
> 18 TPH is what I expect from first class cities in developed countries.
Silicon Valley isn't arranged like a city at all, it's almost rural except for the traffic jams. (San Francisco is another story, but even SF is a very small "big city"). Four trains per hour seems fairly frequent for that type of suburban/exurban environment.
I don't think that necessarily contradicts his point.
It may be the case that the long tail/niche market/counterculture market is also winner-take-all [1], so that non-mainstream content is much more available, yet almost no one actually producing such content can really make a living at it.
[1] Per the article, in the context of "solving a Long Tail problem": "And when I looked at products instead, I found the same distribution: 80% of sales came from 20% of the products."
If all of their other decisions are geared toward increasing their wealth, one has to wonder whether the decision to enter public service is also geared toward increasing their own wealth.