May 11th 2017
Have a name, have a bank account, wow, that thing drops fast! I figure it's false savings to work on less than high end computers, big screens, mechanical keyboards and programmable mice. My time in corporatia taught me that, at the least. Good thing I don't have many employees yet on the start-up cost side! If I'm going to end up as a bankrupt wastrel, it won't be because of poor equipment.
The insurance, regulatory requirements and all that, is annoying, but not really a big deal. When I read about the regulatory burden on small companies in Alberta, I figure I've missed something important. I haven't really seen that much, in either of my companies. I must be doing it wrong.
The "best" part is that with the huge employment collapse in Calgary, centred on the downtown, the vacancy rate is officially 30%, and if you include the room that's rented but empty, estimates run to greater than half. People are offering whole floors for the operating costs only. If you just ignore all the human suffering those empty spaces represent, you could see it as a boon, instead of feeling a bit like a vulture.
I'm looking at a big downtown, corner office for around $500 a month, and it's clear there is cheaper stuff around. Nobody wants to post a price, so you have to look around some, but cheap. Too bad the clients are the people that have vacated those spots! On the other hand, no one has in-house expertise anymore, so they need consultants...vulture.
Parking is another question, but I don't drive. Staff and clients might, but we'll see how it all ends up when I actually move into space. There are a pile of options, anyway. I put down a job title of 'idea fountain' on my APEGA, permit to practice - (APEGA is the regulatory body in Alberta), so we'll see what they think of such 'unprofessional behavior'...I may not be opening shop after all...
The software by subscription, and cloud based back-ups are a huge thing for start-ups, clearly. No real need for networks, if you can wi-fi to a fiber hub. All those cool things that pushed the dot com financial mania in 2000 are dropping into place, just later than Wall Street thought. Financial folks, it always takes longer than you think - just saying. We may actually be starting to use some of that massively overbuilt fiber network trunks that date from that period of over enthusiasm. More profiting from the detritus of past human mistakes.
Those that survive feed on the corpses of others. That's a frame of human progress that isn't as fun as iPhones and Google glasses. I've touched before on how we owe the past, for what we now know. Keeping respect for the past for all it provides us in the now, while learning from past mistakes, is a difficult balance. In my morality, understanding scientific method - good, slavery - bad. Learn and adapt the 'good', lose and learn from the 'bad'. It makes me despair in the species, when individuals put the afore mentioned things with reversed qualifiers.
Right, less maudlin please. Back to the present. I'm trying to work through the complex financial set-up stuff I have to do, to give away most of the company, if I succeed in building it. Our society isn't set-up to share, the 'sharing economy' especially. Taking on the financial risk and giving the upside to the people around me seems unusual enough, that it's actually difficult to set up. My health sucks, I have no children, I want to build something to outlive me - and to do that I need to leave the persistence of it to others...and that is really hard to do?
The financial industry is one that takes perfectly normal everyday words and complicates them with only distantly related new meanings. As least when I do that, it's about the nuance to the general meaning. So many industries just give them brand new meanings, without regard for the confusion of others...not that I'm claiming innocence in propagating the confusion of others.
I'm going to be issuing 'options' at a 'strike price' that 'vest' in a while. All those words mean something else to most people, and it seems financial guys totally don't get that. At least the medical profession and 'old science' did most of their jargon in latin, so it doesn't mean anything else to most people. I think I'm going to put any jargon that develops in my companies in Klingon. Then only geeks will be confused, and they're smart enough to work it out from the context.
On other news, I think my book is almost ready to shop to editors, so keep your fingers crossed for a bidding war! "Yes, I'll suffer through to let you publish my masterpiece for that measly 6 digit fee. The ones that offered more had published books I disapprove of." I don't really expect to be earning a 6 digit fee, unless you include the stuff behind the period. I expect it will be self published, and no sales from people I don't know. It's too much work to market it well. At least technology will come to the rescue in getting it published at all.
Maybe I'll just buy a few thousand copies to get it on best sellers lists, apparently that's all it takes! It's an actual service offered by promotion companies, but that would be cheating. I'm old fashioned in thinking cheating isn't the right way to play. It is another example that if you make something a metric (book sales) somebody will start gaming the metric (paid for, concentrated book sales to get a bestseller rating).
I'll probably underperform my sales potential because of ethical constraints, and prove you have to 'do what it takes' to succeed, by not succeeding. The world is weird that way. So often you need to 'not succeed' in a social context, to 'succeed' in a personal context. It's part of why I think the society as formed in the Western world is broken. More broken in some places than others for sure, and there might even be a few countries that have it right. Just not the biggest ones.
I placed a line above to warn anyone still with me, that the following is a proper 5000 word rambling take on politics and sociology. Past this point be dragons...
Only somewhat connected to the above, the individual freedom, individual responsibility, individual consequence fascination the American ideal has become profoundly not ideal, in a social context. Some of what the founders in the US wrote about, as they were founding their thing, showed that some of them understood that the social context mattered. But the near religiously mythologised "founders" that people on Rush Limbaugh and Fox News talk about apparently fit the definition of sociopaths, and couldn't care about anyone outside their families, if that far. Stiffed any sick relatives lately, Mr President?
If you look at the Federalist Papers, or the Declaration of Independence, it's about governments not keeping you from doing stuff, and building a society supporting the common good of all. And a bunch of these guys had slaves. They thought that it was ok to own other people as pets. They believed in a common good, so in some ways were better people than some of their political descendants, and they kept people as pets. The bar could, theoretically, be lower, but it's getting impractical to actually achieve.
They were conventional of thought enough, that if rich people want to do something, there should be an exemption for them. It's freedom that's at the centre of the formative principles of America!! Well, for everyone except the rich people's pets...always coerced and often abused pets. They've fought a war over it (that's what "states rights" were about - then, as now) and still haven't gotten over it. Some shining city on a hill.
I've said before that the brilliance in Wealth of Nations, (actually "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776)" for the pedantic) wasn't that greed was good, it was that you could harness a negative trait (and greed was still a bad thing in Christian Great Britain of the 1700's, if a positive in some people's view now) to end up with an overall social good. Harnessing a bad doesn't make it a good, just saying - it lets you use the bad to achieve a good. To subtle for some folks it appears.
Taking the writings of 16th of 17th century thinkers, as true of the modern world without adjustment is silly. Some of the insights of those writers are timeless windows into the human condition, sure, but you need to adjust a bit to the new backdrop. The writings of Adam Smith, the American Founders, the Levelers of the English Cromwell stuff hold truths, they are not the truth. Hell, quantum theory shows there are no truths. There are most definitely experiences though, and they should be given weight, but focused through the society of experiencer.
Right, that whole thing traveled way out there, to where I'm not at all sure what point I was trying to make. I'm lost and it came out of my head! I can only apologise to the rest of you, if their still are any rest of you...I'll just shift to another new topic, like it was all planned or something. I need some kind of segue. Ahh, I know. Capitalism shouldn't be viewed as a worthy end point, just a stop on the journey. My dabbling in capitalism, like my periodic dabbling in psychology, is likely to end in tears.
I've fluked into enough cash that I can play the capitalist in the companies I've formed...if being hit by a car can be consider fluky. By capitalist rules, this means I get final say on everything. I know that is a really bad idea, so will find people that agree with whatever wild plan I've come up with, before doing it - the agreer may be the guy on the next stool at the pub, if I have any money left be doing anything after scaring all the people that know me away, but still, need an approval.
In the system we have, if I, as the guy with the capital, screw up and lose all that money, the money is no longer controlled by someone who is unworthy of being in charge, and the money ends up with people that are better able to put it to useful work. That's how it's supposed to work. The parts of the system that cause problems, is the poor souls I bribe and encourage and use my 'great convincer' superpowers to tie into my web, aren't helped out much, in dealing with the bad side of my falling on my face. I'm using superpowers on them, it's not their fault they fell for my line.
I have a risk tolerance sufficient to try new things! Yay! New things don't work out more often than not! Boo! Encouraging people to tie their futures into me trying new things is hard. Boo! I need to be able to convince people that new things are a good idea (Yay!), and if I can't, I get no sales or staff (boo!)- and I should fail (??yay??). It would be easier to convince people to take a ride on the less taken path, and innovate stuff, if failing didn't hurt so much. Both to the failler in chief and those they hire...but mostly the hire ones.
Try to follow that thinking, if you can untangle it, sorry, just think - I have to live with that stuff in my brain ALL THE TIME.... I'll wait here. Ready?, How about now? Ok. So innovation is encouraged by having a good safety net. Innovation is harder if there is a bad safety net. Bad safety nets encourage huge dominating corporations that can proceduralize, optimise and refine 'how things are done' using synergies and advanced optimistic protocol thinking (AOPT?)...or something...
So the way it is done now is reinforced by the cost of entry into massive markets controlled by powerful optimisation based entities. Suddenly, how it's done becomes HOW IT'S DONE. How things are done is hard to change, even in lower case, because of Hassle. New ways of doing things, mean relearning what you already knew how to do, and nobody wants to do that. Innovation becomes hard.
Innovation is a disruptor to 'the way things are done' as controlled by these huge optimising corporations. Innovation is encouraged by a solid safety net. A solid safety net needs high enough taxes to be placed on the folks controlling 'how things are done' that the people trying to put them out of business are encouraged! Evolution is harder into a niche with a dominant player, even if you're a more evolved species.
Dominant industry players, and dominant societal players, don't want to support the people that are trying to put them out of business, or lower their standing, cus who would? They have marketing clout, and in this time of record big company profits (ok maybe not every year of 'this time', or every big company, but still...), they use it. Part of how they use it is to say taxes are bad and those that are already powerful shouldn't be paying to encourage the next people that are trying to be powerful, thus deposing them in time.
Apple has been pissing me off from a consumer side, and somewhat from a morality side lately. But they got into the position to do that by making good products. They made a product that was good enough to keep them alive and struggle through (Macs). They made a new product, that put them at the top. iPods ruled the world. They then did something rarely done, because they were run by a visionary who wanted to make cool things, and was enough of a bully to get his way (another example of a personal bad trait - bully - leading to a social good - cool stuff...the social good is cool stuff, not that it is cool when bad traits lead to social goods - it would help if the incentives were better organised).
He introduced a brand new level of performance into a completely different industry. What they teach in business school is to stick with what you know, maximise your industry before looking to acquire up and comers elsewhere and dominate the world HA HA HA! They actually teach the laugh in some schools, true fact.
Apple didn't buy the iPhone, they developed it. Bill Gates stopped developing new and better stuff when he got on top, cus the all knowing, conservative business advisors and colleagues and self, got all jealous of their positions and told him to defend what he had. Apple kept pushing.
With Steve Jobs dead, they will protect what they have and turn into Microsoft and buy up anything that looks to threaten them for awhile, and get deposed in time. Not necessarily deposed in wealth, but deposed in influence and social standing. They won't develop the technology they buy, that would threaten them, cus it's expensive to develop technology and their already good at what they do, so why go through the Hassle of change? They'll just use the overdone IP controls on technical innovation to hold the world back...probably...or not...like I know!! I'm just a guy who writes to himself on the interwebs.
Already, they've lost the simple user interface thinking that helped them win - I mean, the Hassle of buying stuff from the iStore, when you know what you want, is Ikea like. Don't make me sign in three times and look at a bunch of stuff I don't want, to get to what I do. Yes, I probably screwed something up, and didn't do it right, but that's the point. It was hard to do stuff wrong on an older mac...Impossible to do some things at all, but what you could do, you could do easily.
I want to start a company that also provides a social good. I want clients to move on their contamination issues in a way that allows them to prioritise them and do practical work that makes the world a better place. I don't want to be rich. If I wanted to be rich, I'd keep my money in the market, cus that's fixed, and you make money there. It's siphoned a generation or two's best system thinkers into optimising ways of spinning money in circles to take a cut each cycle. You only have to ride the cycles.
I'm supposed to want to get rich, I've been told a hundred times by people I know. I want to provide a service, and hopefully the money will be there if I provide a really good service. But I get the 'keep going, there is cool stuff in the world' kick in life, out of providing a really good service, that may even help the world in a small, tiny way. I only want enough money to keep being able to do that. I understand I need to watch and manage the flows of money to not blow-up, but it's not the point. We are not in a craftsman's society. We aren't supposed to take pride in good work - we optimise to do good enough work. An 80% is an A...marked on a curve. It's wasted effort to do more.
Let's do good stuff, not try to get rich. Lets add value, but value to the society, not just the economy. The economy is only part of the society. We need good government to shift the economy around to get value to the society. Having a huge group of companies lobbying for their own best interest measured as making more money gives little value to the society and the society has broken, following that model. A good government DOES pick winners and losers in a functional society. They pick winners and losers now, through tax breaks and subsidies and more tax breaks and educational funding focus and tax breaks and other stuff.
Lobbyists exist because government rules can favour companies and industries. There is nothing new about the government shaping the economy. An unshaped economy, turns into an Aristocracy, because power defends itself and is biologically wired to pass that power on to its offspring. Aristocracies suck at progress (pretty much however you want to define progress...or aristocrat). We need the government to pick winners and losers. We need them to be experts at it, so they pick good winners and losers. One of the tools they have is a transparent, light, and strategically influenced market for consumer goods, for sure. The touch needs to be heavier on social and strategic goods.
My efforts at innovating in a small company, if successful, will result in a large number of people in the established industry to have to deal with uncertainty, and, if I'm outrageously successful, unemployment. Is the social good of my disruption outweighed by the efficiency gain in the innovation? I honestly don't know. More Vulture. "Hopefully" is the best answer I can come up with. I worry about friends lives and how they might be adversely influenced. I worry about people I've never met, who might be adversely influenced. There are few achievements, a person can't find a way to derive misery out of, it if they try hard enough...Out, Foul misery...Out I say...
If I make gazillions of dollars and put people out of work, I at least want to pay enough in taxes to help them out. Hell, if I make gazillions of dollars, I want to pay enough taxes, that people that ran into more than they could handle, in whatever way, get enough support to retain their dignity. Not that dignity seems to mean much in America at the moment. But I'm in Canada, and dignity is still given some passing acknowledgement.
There is a place for conservative thought in the world. Change is stressful. Stressful is unhealthy. Too much change, on net does not lead to a healthy happy society - especially if you carefully define 'too much" as the amount that causes an unhealthy or unhappy society. Somehow the conservative movement has been overtaken by the powerful wanting to protect the powerful. It's not about changing too much and alleviating those stresses in a progressing society at all, which, at least, would have some moral basis.
The Republican Party of the USA and in a following a few years behind way, the Conservative Party in Canada, has become an enemy of progress. They are only industry friendly, if you support the existing industries and status quo society. Conservative thinking is, as some Buckley guy said, "standing athwart history, yelling stop'. And he is considered a conservative intellectual and the father of the modern conservative movement in America (well maybe not current, current. The OOWSNN [Orange One Who Shall not be Named] must have him rolling around in his grave). Progress, however you define it, as the enemy.
We've seen that model before. That model is the aristocratic, or imperial or any of the slight variations on the powerful holding court over the weak that have encompassed almost all of human history. Progress was slow for most of human history - not just because of politics, but it was a big variable in the mix.
That aristocratic system is one where the 'strong' today are protected from the want to be 'strong' of tomorrow, minimising and coopting the few 'strong' that fight through. We are heading back to that world. Our modern variety may retain the trappings of Capitalism, but one where none of the consequences of underperformance should fall on the powerful. Instead of Lord so and so, it's CEO so and so, but otherwise it's starting to map closely. Industry in place of land - corporate ranking for the defining strength to get you invited to the big fancy houses.
The end game of aristocracy-like governance is rebellion, as the 'not strong' resist their ranking. You periodically get a bunch of 'not strong' that decide the 'strong' are weaker than them. You end up with riots and unrest as the 'not strong' resist, and if the anger is sparsely enough distributed and distracted enough, the 'strong' demonstrate how the 'not strong' are weak by making an example of them. They may have to offer some accommodation if the 'not strong' are disruptive enough. It escalates over time, until there are guillotines in the street and everything is broken - until a Napoleon can come in, to pull the pieces together again.
Governance steps back a few steps of evolution until the society crawls back up the hierarchy of needs. Recovery takes longer the further down the chain the society fell. The French revolution, the English Cromwell thing, India of the Raj, South Africa pre-Mandela, hell, the American Revolution. We know where this movie ends. How about we change the script? Wars suck. 'Civil' wars suck more...right, I have the Raj up there. Sometimes a totally cool individual can succeed in the revolution with only lots of violence, and not a total war thing. But Gandi is so cool, because he is so rare.
The government of the people, for the people, should provide the social safety valves the societal pressure needs. It's not entirely economic and we've lost track of that. Let's stop lying about what's best for society. Economics has lost sight of the other social sciences. Another Ferrari for Zuckerberg isn't helpful. Facebook buying another start-up isn't helpful. Government helping to provide a way for that bought out company, to compete with Facebook, so they don't have to sell out, is.
IP protection on creative goods are a good thing. If you make a great piece of art or literature, much of the value comes from the scarcity of suppliers and the creator should get the lionshare of the distribution of the economic value. IP protection for technical innovations is on a lot shakier ground. As practised today, it's on quicksand...shaking quicksand. It needs to be re-thought.
The idea (that is absolutely not mine or original to me) that the government, funded by business taxes, pays for contributions of knowledge into the public domain, is much more workable, and my present favourite. You make patents a lot broader, get rid of protection for some trivial deviation of existing knowledge and pay millions of bucks for each idea that gets a patent.
You end up with a society where being a capitalist makes for a lot more sleepless nights, as they have to keep ahead of the sharp end, or lose ground. It's a society that progresses a lot faster, as knowledge transfer is a heck of a lot faster then in was when the current patent system was set up, when monopoly periods made more sense.
It becomes rarer to get a patent, and there needs to be a lot of focus on the ones that are let through. Those with power, would support a rigorous procedure, to offset disruption, so it can be somewhat self regulating. The expertise in granting patents would need to shift to the patent office (the government), and away from outside lawyers. Yes the experts in granting and applying for patents, are lawyers, not scientists. Enough said. System is broken.
The requesting a patent needs to be so simple you don't need a legal department to get one, but checked so closely, crap doesn't get through and get the paid bounty. This isn't an easy solution, but it's a simple one. You'd need actual experts in each field to examine the patent (in the related field would be nice).
There are examples of this type of economic organisation around prizes - the X-Prize stuff, or these carbon prize guys, and it may be how we transition over. But trusted institutions are needed hand out the prizes and any organisation that successfully takes on the social guidance of a group becomes part of the governing institutions of that group.
History has shown that letting the public choose who runs the governing institution of that country, leads to better outcomes for that society to any known alternative. What's say we take care, in selecting people that will run the governing institutions well, and let them run them. Radical I know. Government is not the enemy. Bad government is a huge problem, but the problem lies with the 'bad' not the 'government' part. Good government includes two of the least favorite things in American politics (and by extension, if a few years behind, Canadian politics) - experts and government - working together.
To get somewhat back on point, reforming patents is tied into the whole WTO trading rules thing so tightly, that the whole world needs to agree to a new system. Reforming something baked that far into the global economic cake needs a big crisis. I really don't ever want to see a crisis big enough to make it happen, so the dripping of gradual change is where I'm pinning my hope. That gradual change will not have gone anywhere fast enough for me to see it out, so here's to the kids.
The OOWSNN has the potential to kick off a huge crisis, mind you, but it's unlikely to end in a good way. The special thing about America, is that a lot of the soon to be rebels can find fairly heavy armaments at the corner store, and make actual heavy armaments from instruction on the net. No guillotine's this time. And no better way until we crawl back up the hierarchy of needs. Dripping of gradual change, let's pick that one.
To finish, I'll swing back to the starting the disruptive company stuff. I'm still mostly playing with possibles, and am a month into the progress without many of the cool, hopeful futures curtailed! I mean, the winning the lotto before I started ones, are kinda over, but there's still lots and lots of good ones around. If there are cool possibles on the horizon, the 'not cool' ones can be ignored...or at least not dwelled upon. Keep reminding yourself, and those around you, of the cool possibles.
[update - grammar and wording tweaks]