8 ms·

So you want to be a trillionaire

sys_64738 5y ago
The main character in the 2012 movie Prometheus was a trillionaire but he did a Jeff Bazos and spent it all on a spaceship.
Ologn 5y ago
I think this is slightly askew. A network of a sort is important, but slightly different. In Detroit, cars made a lot of money in the mid 20th century. Cars would roll through an assembly line, the parts of which might be $1500 or so in 1960, and be sold for more at a dealer. Nowadays you have teams building the iOS and Android app and web interface for Facebook and Google, which also have backends, SREs, UX etc. The Facebook Android app is written by a team, and once a version hits production, it is distributed around the world almost instantly, and almost for free (from Facebook's perspective). The costs are in building the first one, the costs of the next billion are much lower ( The Facebook Android app has been installed over 5 billion times https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.katana https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.k... , according to Google Play) Same with Avengers movies. Final cut costs over $100 million, next to that, worldwide distribution to millions of people costs next to nothing. It goes into Netflix and onto my screen. This is what is changing. A lot of money goes into perfecting a piece of digital property, and then worldwide distribution to billions of people has negligible cost. Different than an automobile going through an assembly line decades ago, where each car made cost Ford over $1000 to produce.
- the-dude 5y ago
  You are describing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_cost
  - Ologn 5y ago
    Traditionally, and depending on the commodity, marginal cost can on rare occasions rise, sometimes stays flat, and often falls. With this more modern phenomena for digital products, almost all the costs go into creating the very first product, and then with the production of the copy and subsequent copies the cost of subsequent products falls to near-nothing or nothing. It could be called marginal cost if so desired, but this phenomenon is new in terms of its weight within the economy.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
pavlov 5y ago
I don't want to be a trillionaire. I want everyone to have a fair standard of living and personal safety and medical care. I also want everyone to have access to opportunities to express themselves in art or technology or marketing, so if they make something people want and it doesn't have a deleterious impact on our commons, they can freely gain status or money or whatever they seek. In a world where I am a trillionaire, those gains necessarily have come from exploitation and deep unequality rather than just getting my share of recognition. I don't want history books to remember my name as a robber-baron-slash-Marie-Antoinette, blindly extracting wealth while society collapses.
- rhacker 5y ago
  > doesn't have a deleterious impact on our commons Most of the time it will. Humans will generally profit and succeed by: Mining, Burning stuff and polluting into waterways. If you limit human progress to "art or technology or marketing" you're ignoring all of the things that make a burger available to you impossible. Let alone any quantity of vegetarian food. Now a world like that IS possible, but not one with nearly 8 billion people.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    In a choice between sustainable industry and malthusian population control, I choose the former every time.
- spansoa 5y ago
  > I don't want to be a trillionaire I'm paraphrasing here, but I've always enjoyed the phrases: Rich people still have problems. They just have rich people problems. And: Money doesn't buy happiness, but I'd rather cry in my Ferrari. Or By Mark Manson: Choose your shit sandwich. Choose the pain you want to live with, and choose it wisely.
  - BizarroLand 5y ago
    I'm sure rich people have problems too, I just want to see what they're like
bruce511 5y ago
>> (“i before e, except after c” certainly isn’t enticing people!). With exceptions. Isn't that weird?
- thechao 5y ago
  We must seize the initiative for elaborating on the insufficiency of the science of mnemonics! It is only in the vein of such species of silliness that we can discover how truly weird and foreign our feisty English orthography is for linguists, so that that they can weigh in with their true skills!
unchocked 5y ago
While the essay is cringe, given the enriched pool of unbounded ambition here I want to address the clickbait title. If you want to be a trillionaire, the first question you should ask is why: to what end? That kind of money is power, and power is just a means to an end. What do you believe in? What needs doing in the world? Follow that, and if you get it right you'll find the means will follow. If you need to feel better about yourself, build a secure life and learn to be content.
somesortofthing 5y ago
> An incumbent’s advantage when providing network goods doesn’t preclude better competitors, it precludes slightly better competitors. A new grocery concept that is 10% better can take over the world. A new social network that is 10% better is likely to languish in obscurity forever...I mean better is better, right? And if so, is there something we can do about it? First, in a world with finite ingenuity, attention, and passion—do we really want entrepreneurs looking for 10% better when 100% is possible? How do actual people from the real world come to these conclusions? After 10-15 years of experiencing the nightmare that all of these network goods have created worldwide, how can you possibly say that it's actually good that these businesses are impossible to compete with, and that their competitors needing to vastly outperform them in ways that are not only currently inconceivable but have been inconceivable for a decade despite hundreds of billions of dollars worth of effort being placed into the matter is a feature rather than a bug? How many of those 10% improvements currently in the dustbin of some VC fund could compound to create something that's 100, 500, or 1000% better had they had any chance at adoption? It seems intuitively obvious that these products stifle any reasonable innovation in the space they occupy by their continued remaining in private hands, and that waiting around for the mythical solutions that by sheer virtue of their goodness can depose the corporate titans whose business model is to corrode whatever social cohesion still remains is playing right into their hands.
bryanlarsen 5y ago
The author is almost certainly wrong about the next big thing. Fusion sounds cool, but the fusion part of the reactor produces heat, not electricity. The steam turbines we use to convert heat into electricity are more expensive than wind turbines and solar panels per kWh. That's right, even if coal/fission/fusion is free, they're still uncompetitive. And steam turbines don't work great as dispatchable power, which is really what's needed to complement solar & wind. Natgas runs a turbine directly, which is why it is so much cheaper than coal.
- quacked 5y ago
  If solar and wind were scaled to provide the same kWh as everything else does right now (solar and wind providing all power involved in the mining and repair of the machines used to build solar and wind), would they still be more effective than non-renewables? Or is a combination of renewables and non-renewables the most efficient?

The main character in the 2012 movie Prometheus was a trillionaire but he did a Jeff Bazos and spent it all on a spaceship.

Ologn 5y ago

I think this is slightly askew. A network of a sort is important, but slightly different. In Detroit, cars made a lot of money in the mid 20th century. Cars would roll through an assembly line, the parts of which might be $1500 or so in 1960, and be sold for more at a dealer. Nowadays you have teams building the iOS and Android app and web interface for Facebook and Google, which also have backends, SREs, UX etc. The Facebook Android app is written by a team, and once a version hits production, it is distributed around the world almost instantly, and almost for free (from Facebook's perspective). The costs are in building the first one, the costs of the next billion are much lower ( The Facebook Android app has been installed over 5 billion times https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.katana https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.k... , according to Google Play) Same with Avengers movies. Final cut costs over $100 million, next to that, worldwide distribution to millions of people costs next to nothing. It goes into Netflix and onto my screen. This is what is changing. A lot of money goes into perfecting a piece of digital property, and then worldwide distribution to billions of people has negligible cost. Different than an automobile going through an assembly line decades ago, where each car made cost Ford over $1000 to produce.

the-dude 5y ago
You are describing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_cost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marginal_cost
- Ologn 5y ago
  Traditionally, and depending on the commodity, marginal cost can on rare occasions rise, sometimes stays flat, and often falls. With this more modern phenomena for digital products, almost all the costs go into creating the very first product, and then with the production of the copy and subsequent copies the cost of subsequent products falls to near-nothing or nothing. It could be called marginal cost if so desired, but this phenomenon is new in terms of its weight within the economy.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

pavlov 5y ago

I don't want to be a trillionaire. I want everyone to have a fair standard of living and personal safety and medical care. I also want everyone to have access to opportunities to express themselves in art or technology or marketing, so if they make something people want and it doesn't have a deleterious impact on our commons, they can freely gain status or money or whatever they seek. In a world where I am a trillionaire, those gains necessarily have come from exploitation and deep unequality rather than just getting my share of recognition. I don't want history books to remember my name as a robber-baron-slash-Marie-Antoinette, blindly extracting wealth while society collapses.

rhacker 5y ago
> doesn't have a deleterious impact on our commons Most of the time it will. Humans will generally profit and succeed by: Mining, Burning stuff and polluting into waterways. If you limit human progress to "art or technology or marketing" you're ignoring all of the things that make a burger available to you impossible. Let alone any quantity of vegetarian food. Now a world like that IS possible, but not one with nearly 8 billion people.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  In a choice between sustainable industry and malthusian population control, I choose the former every time.
spansoa 5y ago
> I don't want to be a trillionaire I'm paraphrasing here, but I've always enjoyed the phrases: Rich people still have problems. They just have rich people problems. And: Money doesn't buy happiness, but I'd rather cry in my Ferrari. Or By Mark Manson: Choose your shit sandwich. Choose the pain you want to live with, and choose it wisely.
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  I'm sure rich people have problems too, I just want to see what they're like

bruce511 5y ago

>> (“i before e, except after c” certainly isn’t enticing people!). With exceptions. Isn't that weird?

thechao 5y ago
We must seize the initiative for elaborating on the insufficiency of the science of mnemonics! It is only in the vein of such species of silliness that we can discover how truly weird and foreign our feisty English orthography is for linguists, so that that they can weigh in with their true skills!

unchocked 5y ago

While the essay is cringe, given the enriched pool of unbounded ambition here I want to address the clickbait title. If you want to be a trillionaire, the first question you should ask is why: to what end? That kind of money is power, and power is just a means to an end. What do you believe in? What needs doing in the world? Follow that, and if you get it right you'll find the means will follow. If you need to feel better about yourself, build a secure life and learn to be content.

somesortofthing 5y ago

> An incumbent’s advantage when providing network goods doesn’t preclude better competitors, it precludes slightly better competitors. A new grocery concept that is 10% better can take over the world. A new social network that is 10% better is likely to languish in obscurity forever...I mean better is better, right? And if so, is there something we can do about it? First, in a world with finite ingenuity, attention, and passion—do we really want entrepreneurs looking for 10% better when 100% is possible? How do actual people from the real world come to these conclusions? After 10-15 years of experiencing the nightmare that all of these network goods have created worldwide, how can you possibly say that it's actually good that these businesses are impossible to compete with, and that their competitors needing to vastly outperform them in ways that are not only currently inconceivable but have been inconceivable for a decade despite hundreds of billions of dollars worth of effort being placed into the matter is a feature rather than a bug? How many of those 10% improvements currently in the dustbin of some VC fund could compound to create something that's 100, 500, or 1000% better had they had any chance at adoption? It seems intuitively obvious that these products stifle any reasonable innovation in the space they occupy by their continued remaining in private hands, and that waiting around for the mythical solutions that by sheer virtue of their goodness can depose the corporate titans whose business model is to corrode whatever social cohesion still remains is playing right into their hands.

bryanlarsen 5y ago

The author is almost certainly wrong about the next big thing. Fusion sounds cool, but the fusion part of the reactor produces heat, not electricity. The steam turbines we use to convert heat into electricity are more expensive than wind turbines and solar panels per kWh. That's right, even if coal/fission/fusion is free, they're still uncompetitive. And steam turbines don't work great as dispatchable power, which is really what's needed to complement solar & wind. Natgas runs a turbine directly, which is why it is so much cheaper than coal.

quacked 5y ago
If solar and wind were scaled to provide the same kWh as everything else does right now (solar and wind providing all power involved in the mining and repair of the machines used to build solar and wind), would they still be more effective than non-renewables? Or is a combination of renewables and non-renewables the most efficient?