I've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the HN guidelines, and because you don't seem to be using this site in good faith. Intentionally or not, your comments have the effect of trolling. (Grandiose rhetoric about YC and the HN community, btw, doesn't insulate an account from needing to follow the rules here.)
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe you'll follow the rules in the future.
I down voted this comment because it is based on counterfactual anecdotes (those companies do have popular and well-liked products), and builds on those anecdotes to insult people who believe those statistics, and then tries to inoculate itself against criticism by accusing downvoters and flaggers of responding irrationally. The attempt to frame a predictable response as an unreasonable one hurts the discussion without offering anything in return.
I do agree that world-changing is a term used in contexts such as disease eradication. Certainly disease eradication changes the world more than avoiding a stay in a hotel. However, world-changing as a term is not restricted to the most impactful change to which it has been previously attached. For a typical programmer, making something that lets millions of people have an easier workday, vacation or home life should count as changing the world, even if it is a bit mundane.
What's interesting is how we now view what is 'mundane'. Pretty much my entire 'normal' life in 2016 - in which pretty much everything is mundane - is beyond what many fiction writers were capable of thinking of just 30 years ago. Instant/live audio/video communication with people around the planet - for essentially free (24/7!) - is now taken as 'mundane'.
I know most of us 'know' this at one level - well, many do, anyway - but given the infrastructure we build on, most of what we end up building is somewhat 'mundane' by comparison.
Lastly, I'm of an 'older' generation. Those younger than me do not remember a time when what's 'mundane' now was ever exciting/new/revolutionary. Much like having grown up with color TV, telephones and refrigeration and not being able to imagine a world without those, my younger family really can not imagine a world without near-free 24/7 access to info/communication.
In my home European city alone, 450 000 people have stayed on the 4500 available houses on Airbnb in 2015. Other cities have passed or are planning to pass new laws specifically due to its effects.
"Changing the world" is an ambiguous concept, but you can't say it hasn't had an impact on cities across the world.
Socialists have historically been some of the biggest proponents of democracy. You're probably trolling, but it'd be amusing to know which countries you think have socialist governments in place by force.
Perhaps you have heard of the People's Democratic Republics of East Germany, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, and Albania? Socialism was imposed by a foreign occupying army.
Or take the Soviet Union itself. The democratically elected Provisional Government was overthrown by force. Even the socialists-only Constituent Assembly election was simply voided and ignored by the Bolsheviks when they overwhelmingly lost.
Your claim is empirically false. Socialism has historically been imposed involuntarily at gunpoint in almost all cases where it has achieved any measure of real power. Moreover, once established, its show elections are a farce, with only pre-selected Party approved candidates allowed to win.
You will no doubt reply that none of this was done by "real" socialists, and that <insert your favorite sub-sub-branch of socialism here> are the only "real" socialists. This is the "No True Scotsman fallacy".
History is split. Marxist-style socialism was installed by force in Eastern Europe, Russia, and other places. Democratic socialism was installed by free elections in northern Europe, and continued there in later free elections, with candidates of multiple parties allowed to run.
Ideally, political change can happen without violence or bloodshed. But we don' live in an ideal world. We never have, and we never will.
Pretty much ANY political system gains power through bloodshed. The United States, Canada, England, France, Germany, pretty much the entirety of South America, Africa and Asia... With the wide ranges of political systems that span all these places, each and every one of them was put in place by violence.
You point out the horrible regimes that adopted the word "Socialist" or "People's" in their name and point out all the atrocities that they have committed. While adopting those monickers != actual socialism, you've headed off that argument, so I'll give you that. However, don't lay violence as a means of gripping power at the feet of Socialism... That's a human trait.
Disengenuous to ignore the appallingly violent way Socialism has historically grabbed power and suppressed their populations. Very different from rebellions for independence for instance.
So were the US backed gorrillas in every violent uprising in South America in the 1980's.
So were Belgian trading companies in the Congo.
So were the French people during the Reign of Terror.
So were the Catholics during the all of the Inquisitions.
So were the Spanish during the expulsion of the Moors.
I could go on. The point being that this is not a Socialist trait. The first two were done with Capitalist intent. The last two were carried out with both political and religous power in mind. It's clear that you don't like Socialism, and that's fine... to each his own. But it's "disingenuous" to ignore history for the sake of proving your point.
Ok lets make a list of Socialist societies that formed through rebellion and the formation of popular governments? Its seems to be a Socialist trait that it cant happen without being forced on a population by intelligentsia. Is that fair?
"Colonialism" does not exist as such. It's merely a sometimes useful intellectual abstraction, not a real thing. It has no objectives or purpose, because it does not and never actually existed as a real thing. It's merely a summary shorthand for a certain set of ideas.
Trying to impute motives to an unreal analytic abstraction is the reification fallacy.[1]
It's disingenuous to call attention to US-backed guerrillas in South America without also noting that the supposedly "indigenous people's movements" in the region that these guerrilas were fighting against were not actually local in origin at all.
They were universally created, armed, trained, and funded by the KGB as part of a massive decades-long social engineering program designed to make people think that there were organic third world socialist movements which had spontaneously emerged from the local population's great love of socialism. In reality they were all -- 100% of them -- created and operated by remote control from Moscow.
They served the interests of the Soviet Union exclusively. They were interested in the needs or betterment of local peoples only insofar as this also served to expand Soviet control and influence in those places.
As the local third world socialists usually naively did not realize this reality, the locals who actually worked and fought in the "indigenous" movements were internally referred to as "useful idiots" within the KGB.
Communism has always been an explicitly internationalist movement with the conversion of all countries worldwide -- and especially highly industrialized countries, above all the United States -- to Communist rule as the open goal. Under these circumstances, the US response of funding counter-operations abroad to counteract these KGB operations was appropriate.
You completely ignored (or didn't understand) my point. I spread the attributions of violence around to show that using abhorrent violence to grip power has nothing to do with political inclination, economic system or religion. It is innately human.
That's all entirely beside the point. The post was responding to another post claiming that historic socialists have been particularly great advocates of democracy, which is empirically false.
Whether other systems have also been undemocratic is irrelevant (the "tu quoque fallacy").
> Socialism has historically been imposed involuntarily at gunpoint in almost all cases where it has achieved any measure of real power. Moreover, once established, its show elections are a farce, with only pre-selected Party approved candidates allowed to win.
I simply making the point that gripping power through undemocratic means is not a trait of a particular political belief, but rather a trait of human kind in general. Not agreeing with huac, and not agreeing with you.
You're quoting fallacies while not understanding what's being said around you.
Maybe democratic socialists. But the track record of explicitly socialist nations is pretty much the exact opposite of pro-democratic. There's a decent argument that those governments were coopted by corruption and never actually turned into true socialist governments, but that's also a flaw in the system, as it relies on humans to not act in their own best interest across the board.
I'm thinking new accounts could be unable to comment until they'd viewed 100 different subjects over at least a week? Make it harder to mint these 'troll' account.
If you believe you are hiring him for that reason, then I see why you felt the need to use a throwaway.
You're buying his time and experience for agreed upon hours. You don't have the ability to make him put your work ahead of his anymore than you have the ability to make him put your work ahead of his family, personal life, education or retirement savings.
In discussions like this I tend to fall on sympathizing with employers because until you've taken the risk, hired and managed people you don't fully appreciate just how hard it is or how difficult it is to keep people happy.
What you're describing is closer to buying his life - which would be an understandable arrangement from a business partner but not an everyday employee.
Of course, you're forgetting the most important part!
People get paid for all sorts of reasons. If you are being paid specifically to put work in front of your hobbies, then that is your job! Think database uptime employees who are paid to get up in the middle of the night to fix a bug, etc. Heck, I even paid a friend to eat a shoe once; you can pay people to do all sorts of things. Paying someone to put work in front of hobbies is hardly novel or extreme.
Of course, this should be clear in the job description!!
"If you are being paid specifically to put work in front of your hobbies"
...then it is most probably illegal in quite a lot of countries. Labor codes exist for a good reason. Most people are a) employees b) not willing to put life ahead of work and c) not willing to be forced to by competition from desperate/workaholic co-workers.
Database uptime employees work shifts, so even they should not be forced to put life before work.
Pager jobs at smaller companies are often not on shifts. Larger companies are usually much more realistic about it. Larger companies tend to give you shifts, along with the better compensation and more realistic expectations, at least in my experienice.
Legally, as an exempt employee, at least in California, my employer is in the clear. Hell, I believe they do it to hourly workers, too. I have worked in the computer industry my whole life, but I am told that it is not uncommon for minimum wage jobs to insist you come in at unexpected hours to cover unexpected events.
I've worked at a lot of IT companies, doing developer, sys admin, dev ops .. I've run the spectrum from health insurance to credit card processors -- very little of the work I've ever done is fulling or contributes to society in any significant way (except maybe the University I worked for briefly).
My personal work matters way more than any of the crap I get paid for. That being said, I write good code. My stuff has solid test cases, good design and readable code. I learn from code reviews and try to give good feedback. I generate good work and get it done in a reasonable amount of time. But I don't do over time. I don't work over 40 hours a week. I will not work on the weekends. If you work at a hospital, I can see how being on-call could be important. Any other job, and it's just money you're losing.
Just become my employer doesn't come first, doesn't make me a bad employee. If anything it makes me a better person because I have a life.
I think 40 hrs/wk is plenty of effort for a job. It's called full time for a reason and there are only so many hours a day. It's also why the US DOL has that law about mandatory time and a half. If you need more hours out of someone then you're probably understaffed. Increasing the number of people employed is definitely a good idea.
I hope your employees are mentioning this sort of thing on Glassdoor and the likes so we never accidentally get hired by you!
> As an employer I am paying you to put my work ahead of yours.
As an employer you're paying me because I have the skillset required to do whatever your thing is and the bills that require me to work.
I might enjoy the work, don't get me wrong, but I'm primarily here because you either can't or don't want to do what I've been brought on to do and I can and will do it in exchange for money. I'll even consider signing a non-compete if the money part is enough.
Right... then later when "the Boss" talks to his boss...
Big Boss: "Why haven't you delivered the product yet? I was expecting it midweek?"
Boss: "Well, uh, the team you see... well, they don't think they can deliver... and... "
Big Boss: "If your team can't get this done on the timeline this company needs, get a new team. If you can't do that, then I guess I need a new manager."
Boss: "Yes sir, I see your point."
[Later, with employee]
Boss: "I thought I could give you till the end of the quarter, but we need it tomorrow. Oh yeah, and there's extra requirements now."
Employee: "But you...."
Boss: "I've been overruled and just couldn't push back. You know how it is. Have a good... productive night."
Yup, this is exactly what happens. Basically the same as the "make whoever is in front of you happy until the big boss puts his foot down" anti-management pattern. It can work for periods if the big boss knows what hes doing and respects the employees, but otherwise, destined for disaster.
You don't want a complete pushover, though, otherwise nothing ever gets done while your team is busy playing video games all week. What you want is a reasonable boss!
Additionally, pushover bosses won't stand up for you when Scope creep starts to happen. Before long you will have 20 new change requirements to do in the last few days because someone decided they like the old-old way. (ie the code you just tore apart to appease their previous request)
What's worse is having a boss that's a pushover in one direction. From above, it's always whatever upper management wants, and to his team, it's do it now or you're fired.
You want someone who makes you justify your estimates, so you don't run wild, but is also willing to be like "yeah that really is gonna take 3 weeks longer, go do good work, I'll get you the cover".
>As an employer I am paying you to put my work ahead of >yours.
Maybe you're an employer in a 3rd world country so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, but no worthwhile employer in the US would even pretend to expect that.
Worthwhile probably isn't the best word to use here. Most do it because it is expected of them. Some people thrive with this mindset and others are SOL.
The work culture in Japan is a very extreme case and can't be used to prove that this type of behavior is common in other parts of the world. I would say the majority of companies in the US and in Europe do a reasonable job of respecting the personal lives of their employees--more so if they are part of a union.
>Well it's certainly worthwhile to the Japanese people that work at these jobs for decades. Otherwise they would not do it.
Being conditioned to do something, or being forced to do something to feed yourself because few other job opportunities exist outside Japan's corporate world, are not the same as "certainly worthwhile".
Except, of course, in the sense that not getting homeless or starving is worthwhile.
That if the employer creates a situation where you can't play an hour of guitar at home and put it on youtube without firing you, then it's worthwhile for no valid reason.
That as far as worthwhile goes, that's a pretty low bar. In fact the lowest there is -- where what we do is determined by sheer immediate need and necessity.
To give an example that might sound extreme, but it's the reality for hundreds of millions in other parts of the world (and a decent tens of millions in this part of the world too) a 12 year old child can go work in factories, mines, sweat shops or even prostitute itself to sex-tourist perverts to avoid starving. That doesn't make those "pursuits" worthwhile.
Of course for a privileged or semi-privileged middle/upper-middle class person, on a steady diet of comfortable upbringing, family support, financial support net, cushy jobs, and "do what you love" kind of advice, the situation is probably so alien that what's wrong with it might not even register.
No no no my friend. You are paying your employees to work under the employment agreement that you both signed.
> I am paying you to be productive so that with the collective production of the employees, the company can outmaneuver the competition
Your employees may be so productive on a project that has no future which at the end will not help the company at all. It is you who should steer the ship for competition.
I think you are confusing being a lazy employee with what he/she is saying.
Who told you the parent was interested in working for you and your random company in the first place?
>As an employer I am paying you to put my work ahead of yours.
Nope, employees compensate people for doing specific work for them. Not for "putting their work ahead of their personal life/family/or whatever".
As long as they get their money's worth (and more, since they obviously pay employees less than the value they get out of them, unless the company is merely breaking even), and the job gets done, then they don't get a say in anything else about their employees personal time. Unless they are shitty employees, in which case, let their companies crash and burn.
s/put my work ahead of yours/put my work ahead of your personal life/ is what you're coming across as saying. In real life, there is, and always should be, balance. An employee devoted entirely to work will burn out and perform suboptimally, sometimes dramatically so.
I do the same as the parent. I'm at my best in the morning and someone has to get my second best. The best part of my day is working on personal projects or spending time with my wife in the morning. Work get's my second best when I show up at 9.
If I'm passed over for a promotion because of this, meh. I think I'm doing way better than the guy gives his best to his work and what's leftover to himself and family. Additionally, I've found I do better at work anyway because the rest of my life is order and I show up already having accomplished things and on a roll.
This sort of article should really serve as a wake up call to this community.
There was another article here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12329255, where some comments mentioned that people should retrain once jobs become available for consistent automation.
Typically immigrants do this work, low educated immigrants. They do it because they can't get any other work in higher skilled professions. Sure they could be a driver, oh wait soon that will be autonomous. They could work in a warehouse, oh wait Amazon is doing it's best to disrupt that. They could be a cleaner? Oh wait, companies like Roomba and Dyson are working to disrupt that.
The point I'm trying to make here, is for all the poorly/low educated people and lets be really, seriously honest are in the tens of millions. What are they going to do?
I've traveled all over the world, all the continents. There are segments of the population that can't read, can't write, can't even grasp basic maths. They are the ones who depend on these low end jobs.
Are you going to tell me with a straight face they they can re-train, go back to school and work in STEM? It's just not feasible. Also, who is going to pay for all these millions to retrain for years. Remember, they'll probably have to restart their education, basic maths, basic science, then college, then university. That's what 7 years? Who will pay for their living expenses for them and their family?
There is a ticking time-bomb coming soon. Where we'll have an OMEGA man type of situation. All sorts of jobs will be automated and people won't have anything to do.
What are the solutions?
1) Do we implement 1 child per couple policy? To lessen the burden on the state?
2) Do we provide free schooling with a zero-tolerance on NO child left behind? So that they can go on to STEM fields?
3) Are there enough places in STEM fields for those who do retrain to move into? Is this another thing for government to throw money at?
4) Does society move from a capitalist to a socialist/communist system? But what happens when government runs out of money?
What are we going to do?
Just saying people will retrain is just utter folly.
There is a time-bomb ticking and some of you just don't realise it.
Want to know the result of no jobs, low educated populous, government with no money, socialism failed. Oh yeah. Greece. How's that doing for the last 10 years? It will be like that for another 25.
We need to work less. Society has become more and more productive, but we still work 40 hours a week. There's this obsession that everyone has to be constantly working and then using this money to pay for things. We work to live and live to work.
People used to work 6 days a week, 12 hours a day. One of the effects of the industrial revolution was the 40 hour work week.
It takes less man-hours to create physical products than ever before. A man and a horse used to be able to work an acre a day, a man and a tractor can do 150 acres in a day, and the tractor drives itself.
That's a 15 000 % increase in productivity.
Clothing production has seen similar increases in productivity, so has mining.
We as a society are literally making work for the sake of it.
I agree, and am intrigued by where the 40 hour/5 day work week came from and what the consequences would be of reducing it. Why can't we aim for a world in which people can live happily by only spending half their time working, freeing up more time to actually enjoy ourselves? Is it because some people will always out-compete them by willingly working longer hours? Or something else?
Historically, union-drived pressures and left wing politicians is what made the 40 hour week a thing from the previous 48/56/whatever. That's also how most European countries got paid vacations, ...
They have been completely neutralized since, especially on the "asking better conditions for everyone" front (a perfectly valid strategy when you think about it, companies will in the short term, especially for low skilled workers, make less money (that's ignoring the positive externalities from working less of course) ) hence why you don't see better living and working conditions.
Also, there is more mainstream media penetration, which leds people to be more exposed to the "working more is better" ideology.
Reducing the 40 hour working week still doesn't solve the problem of providing a means of living to uneducated workers whose jobs are taken over by AI.
Some people suggest basic income as the solution: well forget about working less hours then for those people who still have a job, they will have to earn the money to pay for the part of society that can't get a job anymore.
Basic Income is a large discussion in itself, and can’t be dismissed so easily, but this thread is not the place for such a discussion. You’ll have to wait until the next Basic Income thread comes up here on HN (as it has many times before), and try to make your simple dismissal then, and see what happens.
STEM work requires above-average intelligence, and even the most basic jobs are probably only available to 25% of the population. Hard-core mathematical engineering is only available to the top 1-2%. So yes - retraining is pointless if the raw ability isn't there.
But people don't need to retrain. What they need is an economic system that allocates their time usefully instead of declaring it worthless and wasting it.
The amount of work that needs to be done and can't yet be automated is almost infinite: infrastructure improvements, simple renovations, community projects, recycling - the unused pool of potential is huge.
It's not entirely the case right now, at least in sciences, there is still medium-skilled technician work.
But these jobs are subject to the same pressures as driving, cleaning and apple-picking. They're being increasingly automated and the technicians replaced by one person to operate the fluid-handling robots.
Edit: maybe I misinterpreted and you're saying that people don't need above-average intelligence to be an actual research scientist, perhaps on the non-tenure track level. Maybe that's true. But, it requires a strong interest and years of training, hence the long apprenticeship of the Ph.D / postdoc.
I might have missed something -- I was thinking more of industry STEM jobs. I truly believe a lot of people can get into software development, for example, with normal intelligence, about a year of time investment, and perhaps above-normal self-motivation.
If you seriously think that all it takes is one year to become a competent software engineer/developer, sorry , but you have no clue what it means to develop good software.
Software development is devilishly complex (as in multi-dimensional, multi-disciplinary) to do right. It takes years to master it.
I develop software for a living, and I dare say I'm better than most at it. I've been doing it about 20 years, since I was writing Z80 assembly as a middle schooler [1]. It would take a lot more than a year for someone to learn to do my job. But I'm a lead engineer, not an entry level developer.
However, it would take less than the total amount of time I've been building software to do what I do, because my path to my job took me through all sorts of software development I don't do anymore. That includes 8 years of higher ed, of which I apply only a tiny fraction on a daily basis. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't trade all that education for the world. I draw upon it in plenty of indirect ways. I just know there are more direct routes for someone who simply wants to become an application developer.
I know this, because I know plenty of people who have taken less than a year to get into the industry, and are now productive developers. One of my friends even wrote about how he did it in detail [2]. There's a fantastic episode of Software Engineering Daily interviewing a guy who landed a lucrative job at AirBnB little more than a year after doing a dev bootcamp [3]. My own brother has been in the industry less than a year after coming through General Assembly and is doing quite well. I interview people all the time who have similar stories. They're not unicorns.
Developing software isn't easy. But it's also not that hard. At least the sort of software most of us build. You only need a couple people at the typical enterprise who are capable of doing architecture and the most technically intense stuff.
A person of average intelligence but with above average determination can earn a PhD in some scientific fields and make a useful contribution. I've seen it done.
Are you sure that "no jobs, low educated populous" really describes Greece? Especially "Greece 10 years ago"?
I know plenty of highly educated Greek engineers or other professionals (e.g.: archeologists) and not being Greek myself I met them through international working groups, so I suppose they qualify as "educated-enough" outside their own borders, too.
On top of that, the current economical situation of Greece is due to some decisions taken outside of Greece itself and it is debatable if the current state of Greece was really the only possible outcome for them.
Setting his/her rant aside, Greece is suffering from a serious case of "Brain Drain" that their brightest people had fled the country a long time ago even before this latest economic crisis hit them, and after that it accelerated this trend and became more pronounce to the point that it really drags their economic recovery.
I know some Greek expats and they told me about this problem and the dilemma that they're facing now between returning to the country and facing the mounting challenges there, or staying put and watching their country go through this difficult time from faraway.
So, certainly Greek people is not a low-educated populace or whatever he/she said.
Yes, brain drain is an issue for sure (it is also an Issue in Italy, for example, even if the country is bigger and economy is somehow in a better situation, at least for now).
I am an (Italian) expat myself, so I know the dynamics very well.
All the countries in the Mediterranean basin suffer from that phenomenon to a varying degree and the two Italian profs interviewed in the article is just another example for that phenomenon and the state of affairs in these countries.
So, blaming all the shortcomings it wholly on education or culture in general is unfair and misleading.
The number of poorly/low educated people are in the hundreds of millions, if not billions.
And I'm not sure why you feel the need for a throwaway, seeing that HN user has a pretty big biased for basic income.
Also, I don't think your question quite hits the mark, for several problems. For one "runs out of money" is a pretty vague concept and you have to define it more strictly: seeing that money is merely an abstraction for our economy, do you mean a situation where privately owned automation/capital would mess up the economy as we know it (ie. money can't be used, massive inflation etc.), or do we run out of wealth (goods), or something else? In a magical-land of socialist/communist with state-own automation and capital, the first case isn't really a thing. If we run out of goods, then apparently the automation isn't enough and human needs to start getting to work again.
Jobs by itself is merely a proxy for productivity, and productivity is what we want/need. Trying to keep job AND reduce productivity isn't just solve any problem (since someone else will ignore it and blows you out of the water).
Your post has a lot of hidden assumptions -- on top of the fact that the issue itself is a hard one. I mean, if in the end there isn't enough resources to sustain the human population that we have right now, a whole lot of us is gonna die, in one way or another ...
> they'll probably have to restart their education, basic maths, basic science, then college, then university. That's what 7 years?
It's actually going to be closer to 10-12 years. And that's only going to get them to maybe a community college graduate level. They still won't be doctors or software developers or engineers.
Also there's also the simple, but unsolved problem of people just unwilling to learn. You can't make the horse drink and all that.
1) Do we implement 1 child per couple policy?
This would work, until you run out of people.
2/3) Consider AI, what with all the STEMS ? Also, how many stems do we really need ?
4) As soon as everything is automated, capitalist "win the game". No money will flow back. You have to abandon this at some point.
4) What if the government runs out of money ?
Same things that would happen now, increased taxes, or a bankrupt state. In a pure socialistic state this would translate in: you will have to do with less (not money, but luxuries).
Social Security 24%
Health Care 25%
Safety Net Programs 10%
Benefits for Retirees 8%
Social programs according to this consist of 67% of the total budget.
Where is the money going to come from?
Also, you know what happened to France when they hiked up their Tax rates? They moved to London. Where did the Russians go? They moved to London. Where did the Greek millionaires/Billionaires go, probably London.
The rich in the US have already started making plans on where to go, there are a lot of places for them to live.
If you think Basic Income is going to be the solution. I'm very sorry to tell you. It's not!
So a substantial portion of the US is already getting basic income, remove the progressive tax system and replace that with basic income and everybody gets it without spending any more.
then a lot of people will try to run from the hungry mobs when time comes. or suppress them by force, redistributing their money to the force of course, so much for hard-earned income.
Also, you know what happened to France when they hiked up their Tax rates? They moved to London. Where did the Russians go? They moved to London. Where did the Greek millionaires/Billionaires go, probably London.
Expatriation tax (for existing wealth) plus sales tax (for new income). It doesn't matter where they live if the money is taxed at the source.
I'm sorry. I'm not PC, I'm not Millennial, I'm Gen-X.
I was brought up to think about the concept: the best person for the job. The BEST. If I were to hire someone now, I couldn't care less where they were born, what language they spoke, what colour they were, what gender they were, what hobbies they like or gasp political leanings.
Does anything of what I mentioned contribute to how they could perform? NO!
What does? How effectively they are able to actually perform in the job.
I will NOT be pressured by society or anyone else to fill quotas.
I think someone said it best in Twitter. Diversity does not mean lowering the bar.
If you want more of a certain group of people to be in a certain profession. Then make it attractive to them to be interested in it ALSO make them work hard to have the skills so that an employer would hire them on the SPOT!
Let me tell you something. I have worked with some amazing female developers. In my book? I'd hire them over a guy any day, especially when it's coupled with analytical skills.
Seriously. I wish this forced diversity thing would just die. No one company should work hard, it's the other way around. Want to get into a company, work hard and get into it yourself!
Is there anything the OP said that implied lowering the bar?
Indeed, I doubt OpenAI has a strong head-count limit, so hiring a highly qualified man shouldn't mean that hiring an equally qualified women isn't possible at the same time.
There are plenty of women who are more than qualified for OpenAI[1], and yet I'm not aware of any that they have hired in research positions.
(They don't seem to have a team list, so it is hard to know for sure)
You seem very angry about my comment. I'm not sure why. Roughly 14% of NIPS attendees are women and OpenAI seems to be doing worse than that very low threshold for its research staff. If they want the best candidates, they need to work hard to erode systemic biases and patriarchal power structures that turn away good candidates. The longer this goes on, the harder it will be to fix since the senior people in the organization will mostly be early hires and candidates will start to find the problem more and more visible.
Given OpenAI's specific mission, diversity is an important part of the job... if their goal was simply to create the best AI possible, your argument would carry more weight (though I'd still disagree with the conclusion), but when your goal is to ensure that AI advances in the way that most benefits humanity as a whole, it's a real flaw to have a team consisting largely of one group of people.
First, let me explain why drop-shipping is a popular vector for fraud. Drop-shipping means selling a product which you don't make or hold in stock; instead, when a purchase comes in you go and buy it somewhere else and have it shipped directly to the buyer. You can think of it as a form of arbitrage. They're remarkably efficient businesses: they need to have no assets or physical presence. The flip side of that is that if you were looking to create a legitimate-looking shell business to, say, cash in on stolen credit cards then drop-shipping would be a very plausible cover story. It's hard for us to disprove.
Since Stripe is on the hook if customers don't get their goods or services, we need to be able to ensure that the businesses are legitimate. It's hard for us to reliably do so with drop-shippers. While dropshipping is not Shopify's primary business, they are more specialized in ecommerce, they have more business-specific data, and there are a handful of other properties which let them support these businesses more readily.
The simple obvious first guess is, "Shopify makes a much larger margin, so there is more money available to pay for fraud detection"
Or maybe Shopify knows more about their clients or something like that. Regardless, the margins in Stripe's business are pretty thin, so they can't afford to either eat a lot of losses due to fraud or spend a lot of money on detection. It's totally possible that clients who drop-ship things are not profitable on average for Stripe, even if the vast majority of people drop-shipping things are totally legitimate.
Here come the down votes from developers who hold Stripe into such esteem. That's right, if a business does not fit your view of a "business" then they must be a scammer.
Go live outside of your SF/SV bubble and see how it works in the real world!
It's legit for you to factually describe your situation and raise questions about it. And it's legit to use a throwaway account to do so, since there are sensitive business matters involved.
It's not legit for you to break the HN guidelines by yelling, calling names, hounding, and going on about downvoting. Those things aren't allowed on HN. They also aren't in your interest, since doing them reflects badly on your credibility. I know it's hard to resist the temptation to lash out at something you perceive as restricting you unfairly, but if you want to comment here, that's what we need you to do.
Sorry, but this is flat out wrong. I had a protracted exchange with your support and unfortunately I could not get past your first level support who and I do mean this harshly, sounded like they didn't pass first year business school.
I tried to speak to a manager who actually had a clue with business and was denied. In fact, I was pushed from pillar to post and spoke with 6 different people from the first tier support team.
It was at this point, I thought stripe was some fly by night operation, not garnering the level of praise that technical people here on hackernews were giving. Definitely not.
I think in future, should someone present you with a case that falls outside your remit. But is willing to do whatever it takes to work with you. You give them the benefit of the doubt and at least try to help them. In my case, you did not and that's not really great. In fact, you turned me into an enemy who went out to his community and turned a lot of people off you and onto your competitors.
I understand the sentence. What I don't understand is why it is necessary for a support agent to have completed first year business school and why this is an insult (which I take as the intent).
My guess is that they were talking to some kind of business support (as opposed to technical support), and it's a way of saying "they didn't know what they were talking about", when the reality was probably "I want to do something that their company doesn't want to support, and I'm upset that they didn't buy my argument".
They mentioned being a "case that falls outside [Stripe's] remit", and that Stripe didn't "give them the benefit of the doubt".
I'm sorry to hear that. I'm guessing it's now too late, but if not I'd be happy to take a look at your case and escalate it. My email is john@stripe.com.
its really nice when people like you offer to do this, its a really great sign of good faith. But, reality is that a lot of people don't want to have to rely on special treatment to get something done. The fact is that the lowest level gatekeeper in your customer service organization is the biggest factor in how good a company's customer service is perceived to be. If I have a shit experience with the first person I contact in customer service, fight to speak to a manager, and then successfully resolve my issue, I'm still pissed and have a bad taste in my mouth. Its the exact same reason everyone hates "contact sales for pricing" statements on product/pricing pages. Its a bunch or red-tape that does nothing but take up too much of someone's time to figure out if they can successfully use a service or not. As awesome as it is when people like you offer to do this, it means your customer service group has critically failed just based on the fact that this has happened.
Rants aside, Stripe has the best technical/developer support of any company I have every worked with. The constant presence of real technical resources in public IRC channels is phenomenal. I've been able to fire up irc, ask a question, and get an answer in under 5 minutes many times. Well done. I have not worked with support on production issues with charges though; I can't speak to that.
For sure. While I'm interested in fixing the specific case, I'm more interested in discovering the underlying systematic error and fixing the support experience in the cases I don't see.
And thanks for the nice words about IRC! The folks in #stripe on freenode are always happy to chat.
> I know many who drop ship and are not money launders.
No one said that all drop shippers, or even the majority of drop shippers, are doing anything illegitimate.
Those who provide merchant accounts for credit card processing are the ones who assume the risk if one of their account holders is not able to cover chargebacks, and so from their point of view it doesn't matter that the vast majority of drop shippers are legitimate. What matters from their angle is how much they will be on the hook for because of the small fraction that are illegitimate. If that is too high, it can be better for them to just disallow the whole category.
> No one said that all drop shippers, or even the majority of drop shippers, are doing anything illegitimate.
Yes, but STRIPE are saying this. Because it's in their prohibitive items list and if you do it as part of your business, they will not do business with you. This is my whole point.
Other merchants will happily do business, so why not stripe? They have yet explained why...
The guy you are replying to is a co-founder of stripe. You are being downvoted for disagreeing with him. On Hacker News there are certain personalities that you must not debate.
I don't get the connection between drop shipping and money laundering either (As if money laundering was a crime as defined at the federal level- everyone is already guilty).
Nobody would use a credit card to launder money since it is tied to a bank, or in the case of a visa gift card, limited to such small denominations its impractical for money laundering.
That's neither true nor fair; downvotes are explained by the commenter clearly wanting to escalate the argument. collision said tends to, so the objection here is weak and certainly doesn't merit name-calling like "Laughable".
A better way to phrase something like this is as a question. For example: "Wouldn't these criteria apply to Shopify? If Shopify is a legitimate business, how can other legitimate businesses overcome the same hurdle?" Putting it that way would abide by the HN guidelines, would be more likely to get a substantive response, and would take the thread in a direction where we all learn something.
It's hard, of course, to keep one's poise in a discussion about one's business being rejected for an arguable reason, but the alternative is for people to yell at each other, which helps no one and degrades this site.
I run a business where I regularly do between 50-100k a month. There are many other marketers that I know who are also doing the same.
I was not a good candidate and neither were they. Why? Because we act as middle-men between a product creator and the end user.
To someone like stripe, we are scammers. We supposedly put up sites which lie about products, we mark-up pricing and we take the money and not ship out the products. Yes, that is the brush that is tarred amongst all of us.
This could not be further from the truth, as it if was, then we'd be getting charge-backs up the wazzoo and our current merchant providers wouldnt be working with us.
I have yet to recieve a single charge back and I have many many repeat sales. So much so, that I an creating a brand by selling other manufacturers products under my own white-label brand. Which incidentally is against stripes terms and conditions.
What is laughable, is that stripe had no idea about my business model. In fact what they offered was stripe connect and having the manufacturer owning the stripe account. Which would actually confuse my clients even more.
Here is the deal. A lot of manufacturers don't know how to market. They don't know how to setup a sales funnel, market for clients, generate sales, make products go viral and generate 100k of sales. They have tried themselves spending $10k in marketing stacks and spending $1000s on facebook ads and getting nowhere.
But no, Stripe does not want to work with me or others like me. So guess what. We tell everyone one can, DO NOT DO BUSINESS WITH STRIPE.
I don't be doing business with them and I will be telling all my clients and be sure to tell everyone they know as well not to do business with Stripe either. I hope this has a knock on effect that 1000+ individuals who thought about using stripe, use someone else as well.
If only stripe had actual controls where they did reputation testing against IP, actually sided with the seller on charge backs instead of bending over and making the seller the bad guy, or do more fraud analysis.
I choose other vendors who do exactly this and I have had no problems so far.
Here's something. I'm not a scammer. I would rather lose a sale rather than trying to get that money and have someone have buyers remorse and do a charge back or demand refund.
Not all of us want to make a quick buck at all costs. There are other ways of doing this, believe me and STRIPE wouldn't be a way of doing it. That;s just laughable.
If a merchant type has 90% good merchants and 10% bad merchants, then that's too many bad merchants - this means that you either have to treat all of them as very risky; or adopt pain-in-the-ass filtering to make it more like 99+% good / <1% bad if it can be done; or charge a totally uncompetitive 10% extra fee from each payment to cover your risks.
It's not enough for you to be good. If an unreasonably large proportion of merchants in your segment are bad, then you can't be trusted to be good unless there are easily distinguishable factors that differentiate you, or the volumes are high enough to warrant the expense of doing a proper audit of your business, as the some examples Stripe describes.
Proper due diligence is expensive, it may easily be a smart business decision to choose a blanket ban on a minority of segments and leave the due diligence to businesses who can specialize on doing that cheaply and accurately.
The article explicitly gives multiple examples where they have accepted businesses from those risky categories after proper due diligence. However, it's quite likely that for Stripe it makes sense to do so only for businesses above a certain size or influence, not for everyone in the category who applies.
How does one sale white label products? How to get access to inventory? Let's say I want to sale shavers under my own brand and marketing rules? How to start, do I need to have 100k to start? Please sane basic advice or tips.. What is your product?
I'm in Europe and I just polled a whole bunch of friends, anyone using these companies and got a resounding NOPE.
I just polled a bunch of US friends too and they say the same. Sure, purely anecdotal.
But for me, none of these have changed the world.
Maybe if you worship at the alter of YC or a wannabe Paul/Jessica groupie or liberal/progressive fantasist then I guess you totally buy into that.
Transformed is really a total stretch.
I'm still laughing after listening to that interview.
Waiting for the down-votes and I'm sure this will be flagged as it will upset some thin-skinned people who live in a (tech) bubble.