by martin-t | 2025-08-13 13:39:59+00:00
> Of course they are; if someone's going to get money from VCs they risk their reputation in asking for it.

You are unintentionally proving me right. There 2 kinds of people starting businesses which need an investment - those risking their own money (and not reputation) and those risking other people's money (and even then, if a VC wants to judge their reputation, they should look at the details, not binary failed/succeeded).

As a result, you have rich people risking nothing of relevance to them, just playing a game where they statistically win. All the risk if borne by the people doing actual work who are not obscenely rich.

> No - lots of VCs represent large pools of money including pension funds that service giant numbers of people

And there's still some rich asshole at the top who takes a cut which represents more money (sometimes by orders of magnitude) than a person doing positive-sum work can make. So he's not even risking his own money, great, a real improvement.

> Your "rich" company example, Factio, is about the silliest example I can imagine of a capital-intensive business.

I gave it as an example of people saving up in order to quit their day jobs and start a company. How is that silly? Would people saving up to open a small store also be silly? Would a person saving up to buy equipment to open a motorcycle repair shop be silly? Because those are all things people who want to do positive-sum work do.

> Your "obscenely rich" example isn't really about money any more, but so few people are like this it doesn't really affect anything.

Funny how much noise those "few" make. Not so long ago one of them pretty much bought himself a president in a very rich country. Though I have a feeling that is one investment which didn't go as well as he planned.

I also directly know a person who owns so many houses, office spaces and companies he never has to work again and can keep buying more. And he's still several orders of magnitude less rich than the first narcissistic asshole.

Both live a parasitic lifestyle.

Here's something else you (judging by your attitude) won't like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM - to quote "1% of of America has 40% of all the nation's wealth". Does that fall under your "doesn't really affect anything"?

> It's impossible to tell if it's worse, as you haven't described it yet.

In the case of 1 designer, 1 producer, they distribute compensation according to how much work each did. Assuming design took a few orders of magnitude than producing a single item, the designer gets most in the beginning. As more items are produced, the designer gets less and producer more.

- If the producer would earn too little at first, they might agree on recalculating after a batch instead of single item,

- or the producer would go into debt owed to the designer (optionally there could be a condition that the debt is to be repaid only if the item makes enough to repay it),

- or they would both agree on a scheme which is mutually agreeable to both (licensing the design for a fixed price for a fixed number of items at first).

Point 1 is the designer as a person owns his design, there is no company which takes it because he did it "on company time".

Point 2 is all transactions and agreements are made with consent of those doing the real work.

Note that if you're unwilling to engage constructively, I am unwilling to write thousands of words in a HN comment you're just gonna passively aggressively dismiss.

> It's likely to be worse though, as people don't do it.

1) People do it, just rarely - those working in cooperatives almost always recommend the experience. Can't say the same for people in hierarchical organizations.

2) People do it rarely because most have never even heard about it. (And because there's a direct way to remove a dictatorship - those successful gain the top level of power and become the judges or right and wrong; there's no direct way to remove the C-suite - if you employ the same methods people historically used to remove dictators, even democratic governments will attack them in turn while calling it punishment.)

3) For most of history, with rare exceptions, governments were dictatorships. If we lived 200 years ago, would you say democracy is likely worse as people don't do it? This whole last sentence is fallacious.

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BTW, if you're gonna insult me, I don't see any point in continuing this. It does not matter how covert your insults are, the intent matters.