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How to Legally Own Another Person [pdf]
- slater 11y agoI can't tell if this is parody, some kind of "sovereign citizen"-esque bullshit, or a bit of both
- solotronics 11y agoThis is written by Taleb, he is an interesting fellow and I find his thoughts valuable. Recently he made +$1B in a single day with his hedge fund by evaluating risk vs reward with unconventional methods.
- late2part 11y agoNah. Volume shows there wasn't enough transactions to net a Billion, but his firm made a ton. Mark-to-market for a few hours showed +$1B though.
- earthed_it 11y agoif profits seem too good to be true, they probably are.” http://allaboutalpha.com/blog/2015/09/07/billion-dollar-claim-from-black-swan-fund-not-from-taleb/ http://allaboutalpha.com/blog/2015/09/07/billion-dollar-clai... Taleb also publicly disaffiliated himself from the trades. The whole thing is either the hedge fund Trying to capitalize on the PR... Or lazy sensational wsj journalism. Or both. Read PG on PR firms http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- finance-geek 11y agoYou only see volume on listed transactions, not on contractual derivatives.
- neuro_imager 11y agoThis must be your first time reading Taleb.
- mintplant 11y agoI read through the whole chapter and I didn't see anything sovereign citizen-esque in there. It's an analysis of the modern employer-employee relationship.
- BorisMelnik 11y agoI agree, just read the first 5 or so comments on this thread and it is almost as if no one even read this post which by the way was an invigorating read. Great argument of contractors vs employee from an employer and economist stance. In summary what I got from it is that if you really want your staff to "be there" for you then an employee is the way to go. If you want to save money and have talent, go the contractor route.
- coldtea 11y agoThat's probably because you didn't read past the 3-4 first paragraphs where the brief description of a (historical) "sovereign citizen" religious sect ends. The rest of the text (and I would say even that part) is totally unambiguous, and offers nothing to be mistaken for "parody" of any kind.
- titomc 11y agoget the person an H1B visa and you legally own him. Indentured servitude at its best.
- avmich 11y agoDid you really try to be on any of the sides of such a relationship? Otherwise I'm afraid you can be surprised.
- justinjlynn 11y agoAn employer of an employee on a sponsored H1B visa is unable to keep that employee from finding new employment at another employer who is willing to file an H1B petition. There isn't any way for the current employer to find out the employee has applied elsewhere. If the employee already holds an H1B, then the new employer is not limited by the yearly H1B cap [1]. I am by no means an expert on legal or immigration matters, so you'll have to do your own research. Also, since you refer to an H1B but did not explicitly state the country, I'm assuming you're referring to the US where Skilled Immigration for Work visas are typically called H1Bs. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Cheers [1] <http://www.immihelp.com/visas/h1b/h1-visa-transfer-faq.html> http://www.immihelp.com/visas/h1b/h1-visa-transfer-faq.html> -- looking for a better source that's not commercial, happy for pointers.
- ashrust 11y agoYou're right and H1B transfers are easy and would only scare off an inexperienced employer. I moved jobs twice on a H1B without incident, even though one of my employers tried to make it an issue. I'd suggest the generally precarious immigration status of visa holders in the US contributes to this myth.
- dataminded 11y agoMy understanding is that changing jobs can be detrimental to your application for a permanent green card in some cases.[1] Sometimes that is bad enough to keep you where you are. [1]https://www.quora.com/If-an-employer-has-applied-for-a-green-card-can-one-change-jobs https://www.quora.com/If-an-employer-has-applied-for-a-green...
- kayman 11y agoIts good food for thought.
- late2part 11y agoNot everyone agrees, but I often feel like I'm reading genius when I read Taleb. I especially like his insight about those really comfortable not putting on pretensions or airs. Go to Bucks in Woodside some time. The really good VCs are really good genuine people.
- cgh 11y ago"The best slave is someone you overpay and who know it, terrified of losing his status." As I sit here entering my 12th hour of work for the day, this sounds remarkably legit.
- escherize 11y agoExcept it conflates a voluntary relationship for a forced one. Slavery is being taxed at 100% of you output.
- duncan_bayne 11y agoWhat about being taxed 40%? I recently severely pissed off a correspondent (who'd written Yet Another Article on the evils of capitalism) by equating compulsory taxation with slavery.
- Aeolun 11y agoThe difference being that you get something back for that. Also, that you're free to leave at any time.
- fennecfoxen 11y agoWell, taxation as slavery is rhetoric with a long, strong, tradition going back to pre-Revolutionary days. But if you think the sort of person who writes about how "capitalism is evil" is going to have the background to meaningfully process and respond to that language, that's another matter entirely...
- rwhitman 11y agoI really enjoyed reading this. If I wanted to pick up one of his books, any recommendations out there for where to start?
- FlailFast 11y agoBlack Swan is still his best in my mind, but the Bed of Procrustes can be a nice entree; aphorisms were the original tweets, and can be consumed as such. Then I'd jump into Fooled By Randomness, and finally Antifragile (which is the weakest of them...truthfully I think the entire book could have been a chapter in Black Swan, but I'm glad he wrote it all down anyway).
- jessaustin 11y agoI've read them all, and I agree completely with your judgement of them.
- rwhitman 11y agoReally appreciate the recommendations, thanks!
- Animats 11y agoThe one you really want to read, Taleb won't let you - the actual returns from his funds.
- OldSchool 11y agoAll of his books have been worthwhile in some way. "Fooled by Randomness" is a great place to start. Its effect of exposing the lack of objectivity in many commonly-accepted beliefs that rely heavily on perceived cause and effect can add maturity and humility to your own worldview. Ironically, my only complaint might be that Taleb seems to get a little more self-congratulating by anecdotally revealing the lifestyle he is able to enjoy as you progress through his series of books. Perhaps this is more of a style device to broaden the books' appeal. Whatever the case, the perspective you can gain from his writing is worth the time.
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- _lex 11y agoThis is incomplete, but very, very good economic analysis. In the end his points are simple: 0. Employees are willing to trade "freedom" for job stability and increased average returns. Contracters will more easily defect for sporadic higher paying opportunities, which makes them less reliable. 1. Employers can overpay employees while ensuring that they know that they are overpaid, to 'domesticate' their employees and improve reliability of outcomes. 2. Decades ago, employers could also promise long-term job security to achieve similar effects, however rapidly changing markets mean their future existence (and ability to grant stability) is in question. 3. Instead, employees have fixated on cross-company careers, optimizing for general employability , which means that they must still conform to the requirements of a domesticated employeeship. 4. However, when employees have significant, direct, measurable profit impact skill, and can make or break the company, they can not be owned. He also does an economic analysis of cursing, while explaining that maximizing employability tends to strip away the parts of people that can make them great.
- _lex 11y agoTwo interesting things: 1) this predicts difficulty in controlling contractors and getting them to stick to schedules. It explains why taxis suck, homejoy struggled, and showcases that uber circumvented the entire issue of driver reliability by only doing on-demand rides. It also predicts that scheduled contractors will attempt to steal clients from the scheduling company (direct measurable profit impacting skill - you can't own them). Perhaps the on-demand service strategy that works requires either the use of employees or zero-scheduling/real-time request resolution. 2) As an employee, you must figure out how to measure your profit impact and consistently represent that metric as fact - socialize the idea that you have profit impact. You also want to figure out exactly how what you do and how you do it can increase or decrease profits: being the person who's able to both represent a meaningful metric and show how you've affected that metric, and how that metric should have affected the bottom line will make you the most valuable. If what you do does not impact profitability, then do something else.
- acveilleux 11y agoOne way to view Uber is as a redundant array of inexpensive drivers. Since the individual contractors are fully fungible and numerous, one will usually be available to take on any new request. It is an anomaly of the Uber model that the barriers are incredibly low, the service is provided very quickly and that a significant number of drivers are willing to idle waiting for a ride. This is reflected in the relative low pay. Even then, I bet Uber has retention or reliability problems with drivers.
- kawera 11y agoAnother chapter of the same book: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/minority.pdf https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/50282823/minority.pdf
- nulltype 11y agoAlso interesting, is the title of the book "Skin in the Game"?
- skybrian 11y agoPerhaps there should be some equivalent of Godwin's law for this sort of comparison. Golden handcuffs aren't meaningfully comparable to actual slavery. If you think it is you're out of touch with history. The pilot contractor doesn't seem like a great example, either. Contractors usually have to think about their reputations. I don't know the industry, but it seems unlikely that there's a huge shortage of pilots, given how poorly beginning pilots are paid.
- sokoloff 11y agoThere is a huge shortage of pilots...who are willing to work for the starvation wages the regional carriers offer. By the time "Bob" in the story had the status and seniority number to be captaining a trans-oceanic route for a major, he'd be making well into six figures a year working 11-15 days a month. He'd have enough to lose that the Saudi prince would need to pay him his salary until age 65 (mandatory retirement for part 121 airline flying) to make his choice to walk away a rational one.
- theGimp 11y agoI'm trying to find this book, but coming up short. Can somebody tell me the name of the book?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- pouetpouet 11y agoThis is a draft of book yet to be published. In the meantime Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan are worth the read.
- n00b101 11y agoVery thought provoking. It seems like a good argument in favour of entrepreneurship and risk taking. But I'm not sure that I agree with Taleb's glorification of Front Office banking roles in sales & trading. Like any sufficiently highly paid corporate employee, traders are compensated mainly through company shares which vest over a long period of time. These days a trader's bonus can even be clawed back, many years after being awarded. Rumour is that Wall St traders are often caught up in a culture of excess where bosses pressure them to spend/live extravagantly and become completely dependent on annual cash bonuses. For all the supposed risk taking tolerance bravado, traders are merely risking the firm's capital and not their own. In some ways it is similar to the expat role - just as some executives are chosen to be expats, some bank employees are chosen as traders and given enormous amounts of the firm's capital to bet with. No one can say what to look for in hiring a good trader, there is no consistent basis for selection, there are no academic or professional credentials for traders, the bank executives can choose to shutdown a particular trading desk on a whim, the worst fear of a trader is to lose this coveted position, and most people do not last very long as traders as their luck runs out eventually at the poker table. If an expat executive is like a diplomat fearfully being assigned from one foreign posting to the next, then I think a trader is like a gambler-slave sent to gamble with his master's money in the casino and he is in constant fear of the dire consequences that await if and when he loses too great a sum or fails to win large sums frequently. Trading jobs are usually a better deal for the employee than most comparable jobs, but it is still an employee job and it attracts exactly the kind of people who go to business school and actively seek low risk careers and dependence on a paycheque written by a prestigious employer.
- spacecowboy_lon 11y agoA saw one wall street Forum where young traders where advised not to wear expensive watches as their was a strict hierarchy. Apparently wearing cufflinks was also a no no - which made me smile as the on or 2 days a year I wear a suit I ways wear shirts with cufflinks.
- littletimmy 11y agoIt is interesting to note that a few hundred years ago, people didn't make that big of a difference between chattel slavery and wage slavery (labor). Both were university acknowledge to be great evils, and it was as dehumanizing to rent a person than it was to own a person. Somehow we've all accepted wage slavery as alright. Good even! If someone doesn't have a job we deride him as a lazy ass for not wanting to sell his labor to a capitalist. A solution: universal basic income. Give everyone fuck you money. Then you'll have a free society.
- dracht 11y agoWhere will this basic income money come from? Forced taxation, aka extortion, aka partial slavery. That's not a free society, just a different master.
- littletimmy 11y agoTaxation is not partial slavery because the money is not yours to begin with. What you "earn" is partly due to your efforts, and partly due to you utilizing the infrastructure and institutions built by everyone else. So a part of your "earnings" is society's. That part is called taxes: what you owe to those who enable you to earn. We can also put taxes on corporations instead of people. Corporations are not humans, and therefore cannot be made slaves.
- miscellaneous 11y ago>Taxation is not partial slavery because the money is not yours to begin with Ah, we have found the key contention. An interesting thought is to consider a world of fully mobile people - who will move and who will stay in a country with universal basic income and high taxes?
- littletimmy 11y agoThere are alternatives to high taxes. We could have a Georgism-inspired economic system in which the land and natural resources are publicly owned and leased from the state, but what you create is yours alone. That way, there are no "high taxes" on what you create. The universal basic income is financed wholly by the wealth from leasing everyone's land and natural resources (which is much more justifiable because land is always appropriated - never created).
- kakakiki 11y agoAfter a particular age, there is nothing more frightening than change.
- jazzyk 11y agoTo some people, there is nothing more frightening than _lack_ of change. And age has nothing to do with it.
- jondubois 11y agoI've been both an employee and a contractor for various companies. I found that being a contractor is usually easier, the work hours are shorter, the pay is MUCH better and 'job' security is actually higher (which really surprised me - I've never been fired from a contract job). From a company's point of view; contractors are not good value. Sure, it's better to hire independent contractors than to outsource everything to an outside company, but a contractor is nowhere near as productive as a full-time employee. The kinds of companies which hire contractors instead of full-time staff are often interesting companies...
- codingdave 11y agoAs an employer, you don't need to fire contractors. You just let their contract expire and do not hire them again. Very clean, no pain, no conflict, and the contractor many times walks out the door not even realizing you would have fired their ass under different circumstances.
- toptalentscout 11y ago>> but a contractor is nowhere near as productive as a full-time employee I disagree, also speaking as someone who's seen a mix of runs as a contractor, consultant and staff employee. It's the individual who is very productive or not, not the role they are filling.
- jondubois 11y agoYes that's true. Contractors are often more skilled than non-contractors (they've often older and had a wider range of experiences). But contractors, like entrepreneurs, are self-serving individuals. If your company has a large codebase and you depend too much on contractors, they may create a 'clan' inside your company and they will have leverage over management. I've seen this happen in large companies, never in a startup though. I agree though that it's not because they're contractors. It's more because they're greedy.
- tonyedgecombe 11y agoYes, I've worked on a few sites where the employees were let go before the contractors.
- squozzer 11y ago"Indentured servant" has too many syllables. Peon might be a better term, because its meaning leans towards economic rather than legal subordination.