The reality is that you get crap like Facebook, Instagram, Xwitter.
It's fine to want that and to attract those kind of people. What you don't want is to attract people who want to do that in order to make a lot of money.
If you want innovators, motivate them with rewards. Money is a great reward since you can turn it into mostly anything you’d like. Want to buy a mansion? Fine. Want to travel around the world? Feel free. Want to give it away to charity? Great!
It’s absolutely mind blowing to me that people like you can sit there and go, “no, you shouldn’t be able to retire in NYC for saving a few hundred thousand lives because the thought of you getting $10 million is icky to me.”
And...people accept that as a natural state of being? New York has over 8M residents, do all of them have $10M saved for retirement?
Or is your idea of retirement completely out of sync with what retirement really is for most people?
$10M over 50 years - $200k/yr or $16k/mo
House in a rather expensive place - $5k/mo
Food, travel, other things and especially projects can eat the rest $11k/mo
If you mean the lucky few of us who can "retire" at 30-40 and enjoy 50 years of retirement - that's such a statistical anomaly that it might as well not exist.
>>Food, travel, other things and especially projects can eat the rest $11k/mo
And also yeah, that is wildly wildly off. Again, if you want to have such an absolutely extravagant lifestyle to spend $11k a month on food and travel then sure - you probably do need $10M. But it's nonsense to say "you need $10M to retire in a big city". Clearly millions of people don't.
Also, your numbers assume you earn nothing in retirement, which is unnecessarily pessimistic.
Also, $11k a month for "food travel and other things" seems like quite a lot to me. I mean sure someone can spend $11k a month on "projects" but that doesn't mean that's something we as a society necessarily need to support.
We can have something earned from the money, but pension money have to be conservative, so the upside could be limited.
$11k a month for "food travel and other things" - healthy food isn't unfortunately cheap, neither is good travel - but those other things could be even more expensive. You might want to start an enterprise, and you'll need seed money. You might support a cause, or run a non-profit, or do other things which are noble but not easily rewarding in monetary sense.
Yes, we as a society probably can't - not don't need, but can't currently - support this. But it doesn't mean people shouldn't aim for this.
Frankly, I don't see strong evidence against so far.
Who retires at 50? But even ignoring that, I had to check the numbers - in the UK at least, only 0.02% of people live to 100, the chances are "wildly" against all of us in that regard. Sure it might happen - I wouldn't plan for it.
>>$11k a month for "food travel and other things" - healthy food isn't unfortunately cheap, neither is good travel - but those other things could be even more expensive. You might want to start an enterprise, and you'll need seed money. You might support a cause, or run a non-profit, or do other things which are noble but not easily rewarding in monetary sense.
Your assertion was that you need 10M to retire in a big city, the need part is what I'm challenging. If you want to lead a rockefeller lifestyle in retirement - sure. But that won't apply to 99.9999% of population who just want to live out their life in peace and comfort. Let me put it this way - I don't know anyone who makes $11k/month in their regular working life, the idea that you'd have that during retirement is almost....absurd? Who outside of rich elites has "seed money" during retirement? I think we're thinking of completely different social groups.
So no, unless you're part of the 0.00001% you don't need 10M to retire in a big city.
That's a very good point: You really do need a lot of money in the US to feel reasonably secure for the long term. This might be good for employers, entrepreneurs, investors etc., but since most people in society aren't that, I'd argue that the average quality of life is worse for it.
> If the goal is financial security to the extent that you could not work
This actually seems like an anti-goal to me, societally. Why would we want to disincentivize the people that arguably have the best track record of contributing to progress from continuing to do so?
Crabs in a bucket.
From that:
- 60k for capital gains tax
- 100k for (exorbitant) education for children
- 40k for healthcare (the most expensive plan on my expensive state's marketplace for a family of 4 is $36K).
That leaves $200k for living expenses. If you can't find a place to live comfortably (anywhere, since you aren't restricted by work) on $200k/year, we have very different expectations from life.
The US sustains that high number of people who strike $100 million+ through having a social safety net that barely exists, which results in far more people being seen as completely disposable. It also comes at the cost of worsening public education, worsening public health, crime rates beyond most first world countries, companies that constantly invent new evils like making all formerly paid-and-done services into monthly subscriptions. Few if any that hit 100 million are doing it ethically. They're doing it by milking the residents dry.
Some countries have national pride and resent the idea of stepping on their fellow countrymen. Some would kill half of them if they were promised a few % off their yearly taxes.
This is incorrect and you’re really out of touch for suggesting it.
Let’s say you have a 5 million dollar exit in the Bay Area. After tax you get roughly 2.5. That’s enough to buy a nice but modest house and now you have no money left. You now have to work a full time job to pay the property taxes, the rest of your living expenses, and try to save for retirement. Same thing applies in LA, NYC, SEA, etc.
> The US sustains that high number of people who strike $100 million+ through having a social safety net that barely exists
This is false. The US spends more on healthcare than any other nation, it just goes to a bloated system. More tax money from the 0.1% won’t change that.
> crime rates beyond most first world countries
Gonna need a citation there. This is likely a result of guns being legal if you’re talking about gun deaths or a result of the war on drugs if you’re talking about incarceration. Neither of those have anything to do with taxes.
> companies that constantly invent new evils like making all formerly paid-and-done services into monthly subscriptions
We’re talking about biotech exits. Drop your “muh capitalism bad” gish gallop.
> Few if any that hit 100 million are doing it ethically. They're doing it by milking the residents dry.
Pure cope. A broad unsubstantiated statement about ethics followed by talk of milking residents dry when those residents have more disposable income per capita than nearly anywhere else in the world.
> Some countries have national pride and resent the idea of stepping on their fellow countrymen.
If they do this by treating huge breakthroughs like you are doing, they are stepping on all of their fellow countrymen through oppressive tall poppy syndrome. Knocking anyone doing well down is not how you lift everyone up.
So what you are saying is that ONLY if you work your brains out AND win the "lottery", then you can have a decent retirement in the US?
Maybe Europeans are just too smart to accept that kind of proposition.
The "American dream" is a lottery system used to lure people into doing hard work and consequently rewarding only a few.
That's doubly important if your points are good, since by posting like you did here, you discredit them.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
> It takes many billions to buy a Twitter, even when Saudi Arabia is footing most of the bill.
There's some nice article out there that clearly explains how money "changes" at different income levels. First it's security, then it's comfort, then it's power.
Buying Twitter isn't spending money, it's exercising power.
There are very few open source contributors that are actually really good. The nature of software means that their labor of love can scale very well.
Additionally, there is nearly zero barrier to being an open source developer. Buy a laptop and start writing code.
So open source only works well because when you get lucky and get a combination of a motivated contributor and essentially zero distribution cost, a single group can ship to billions of people.
If we want someone making an artificial heart, it’s a completely different story. The research and development is very capital intensive so you need a war chest to even start tinkering. Then once you have something you want to try to get approved, you need either to be a medical doctor or employ one, which is a huge opportunity cost for a medical school debt ridden doctor.
All of the capital needed to fund this is high risk so it needs a high upside return if private investors are involved.
Now a founder could eschew all of their equity, but after going through all of the work to do this capital raising it would be quite unusual.
Actually, society is much better off since the money is dispersed into the economy faster and to a much greater degree than most other windfalls.
And most other windfalls are crafted to accumulate money from the economy, so the difference in who ends up with the money is another major factor.
I also don’t think you understand wealth creation. A lottery is zero sum. A biotech company that makes $1 billion saving a couple hundred thousand people from early deaths allowing them to contribute to society is wealth generating.
In terms of expected value (which you'd hope that scientists and entrepreneurs understand at least at a surface level), that seems like the rational move.
If someone wins the lottery and gets rich, society isn’t better off. If someone starts a new company that made a cure for some disease and gets rich, society is much better off.
You absolutely want to attract people that want to make huge breakthroughs with unlikely odds of success.