What The Bubble Got Right 340
dtolton writes "Paul Graham has written an article entitled What the Bubble Got Right. In recent years the roaring tech bubble has become a byword, yet Paul does an excellent job of articulating what it got right."
Wish I had a job before/during the bubble. (Score:5, Insightful)
The Net will change everything (Score:5, Insightful)
"I think the Internet will have great effects, and that what we've seen so far is nothing compared to what's coming."
That's been my view all along, both during the boom and during the bust. We ain't seen nothing yet. When you create a means of communication such that almost anyone on the planet can interact with anyone else on the planet, great things will develop from it. We saw only the baby steps during the boom, and the bulk of what will develop is yet to come. But it is coming. People love to jump off fads and disavow them. That's especially tempting if you lost money in the process. But the idea of person-to-person direct communciation, and everyone-is-an-author concept, is no fad. People love to communicate, they love to express themselves, and the streamlining that the Net makes possible has, is, and will continue to make breakthroughs in the business world.
Just give it time and we'll see wonders yet unimagined.
I think Marx would shit a brick if he could see us (Score:4, Insightful)
Now I know that some will look to outsourcing and say, see class exploitation still exists! Yes, but it is the fault of the people of many of those countries. If your government is corrupt and you have a democratic system of government, why are your people systematically voting for political parties that keep your country from growing. America's corruption is bad, but it doesn't hinder growth anywhere near that of many developing or stagnate countries.
People often want it both ways. They don't want to adapt to a new economy, but they want all of the benefits. You have three choices, and these have existed for most of human history. You can lead, you can follow or you can be dominated. America leads, India follows, others are simply dominated because they refuse to follow the leaders' example and try to grow, and cannot lead on their own, thus another country steps in and economically dominates them. It doesn't mean it's right, but it's a fact of life.
The law of unintended consequences will one day come back to haunt corporate America if it doesn't realize en masse that domestic research and development and manufacturing are the safest route. The rule of law in America can be safeguarded, but Americans cannot do so around the world. The lesson of the "rise of the nerd" is that yes, you can start outsourcing jobs eventually to "regain power over the nerds" but what happens when those you outsource to abscond with your R&D results and your domestic nerd base is so atrophied that they can't compete?
The lesson of the modern economy is that businesses need to realize that no part of the company is less valuable than another. Whereas in the past, the rich could safely exploit their employees, they now do it at the risk of their own base of wealth and power.
I lost him here... (Score:5, Insightful)
I just don't believe that. I remember people talking about how this was bogus at the time -- AOL got slammed for similar practices. If I knew it was a pyramid scheme, I find it hard to believe that the incredibly sophisticated finance types working for Yahoo! didn't.
I used to live in Chicago. When I first moved there, I wondered why none of the aldermen seemed to be honest. The answer, I think, is that the system prevents honest people from moving up.
I have the same impression of wall street. I don't think that honest managers can run public companies in a way that's competitive. A guy like warren buffet is an obvious counter example, but he's unusual and he dates back to a different era.
By the time these crazy bubble scams came around, we were living in a different world with different expectations. Share prices had to rise quickly and constantly, and the only people who could pull that off were scamsters.
I don't think the geek community has ever really come to terms with what happened on the financial side during the bubble, how crooked the people who ran it really were, or how much damage it did to the economy. The google IPO was surrounded by nostalgia for the bubble -- if only the old days would come back!
Almost all of what this guy says strikes me as questionable at best.
Graham's daydream (Score:5, Insightful)
The big question here is how you can possibly build customer loyalty if you outsource the business unit which is in charge of customer relationships. This doesn't sound like a wise idea to me.
Look at the bigger picture (Score:5, Insightful)
California??? Duh... (Score:5, Insightful)
Where has this guy been?
California has been the next instant source of wealth since well before the gold rush! The bubble wasn't the first time silicon valley became the center of the universe - take a look at the first PC boom/bust of the 80's.
Sorry to be so provincial here, but being a California native I have a bone to pick about the characterization of California. Sure, we are all totally super nice out here and polite and all of that (um - yeah right) - but keep in mind, most of the people from here ARE transplants.
I'm a native of the Bay Area and have lived here all my life - I can count the number of people on maybe one hand who I know can say the same. So the attitude has little to do California or Silicon Valley.
I took a detour to New York for a year and a half in the mid-nineties. While I found that most New Yorkers did have a rough crusty exterior, once you get passed that they are as warm as anyone from CA. Not only that - but friendships (like startup ventures), have a tendency to be somewhat transitory in California. I found the opposite on the other coast.
That said I wouldn't live anywhere else - but to each their own.
Re:Graham's daydream (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I hope my boss is reading this... (Score:1, Insightful)
I regret to inform Mr. Graham.... (Score:4, Insightful)
You need that to get a really big bubble: you need to have something solid at the center, so that even smart people are sucked in. (Isaac Newton and Jonathan Swift both lost money in the South Sea Bubble of 1720.)
He's wrong. Really wrong. I, and others, were able to see through the hype and stupidity during the bubble, and see what companies had real value, which didn't, which were over-valued, and in some cases, which were under-valued. I don't know how much money he lost, but claiming that "even smart people are sucked in" isn't a valid excuse, and no amount of history on how physicists and poets don't necessarily good economists is going to change that.
steve
Eh...no, he's wrong about one thing. (Score:4, Insightful)
Sorry, boys, we had our time, and it's come and gone.
Re:I hope my boss is reading this... (Score:5, Insightful)
In addition, the rumors of the obsolescence of powerful connections is greatly exaggerated. Just ask Halliburton.
Biggest Impact? (Score:3, Insightful)
(Results 1 - 10 of about 695,000 for titties. (0.36 seconds) - direct from google
Nitpick (Score:4, Insightful)
I've seen plenty of ads for Google's "adsense" technology, especially here on
Re:Lessons learned. (Score:5, Insightful)
A few more...
The Alternative Minimum Tax laws affects more than Bill Gates and the rest of the 'super wealthy'. Get professional advice.
Those pesky legal contracts can really get you - pay attention to what you sign. Treat them like they did ask you to prick your finger and mumble something about your first born. Get professional advice.
Those who turned the lights off in the server room often found the quad processor Sun kit was really noisy when you brought it home.
Re:bad article (Score:1, Insightful)
Quit trying to follow the money, and be happy (Score:5, Insightful)
I have no patience with people who decided to become software engineers (or doctors or lawyers or golf ball polishers) because they thought/were told/read somewhere/had a divine revelation that "that's where the money is".
People who decide to go after work that they don't enjoy in order to make more money than they think they would at something that they enjoyed, are doomed to be miserable. They will be be miserable IN their job, they will be miserable AT their job, and they will make the people around them miserable, too.
Having a vendor certification/college degree/union card doesn't mean you will be happy at a job, and it doesn't mean you will be successful at one, either.
Find something you really enjoy doing, and then find someone willing to pay you to do it, and you will be happy.
And if you're happy, you won't need to bitch about how terrible the job market is, or how your "investment" in your certification/college degree/union card "is not paying off". A job is not something you can buy from a diploma store, or that you have a right to, having spent some requisite amount of money at one.
I've interviewed a lot of people for a lot of jobs, and I'll tell you right now: I don't hire or recommend hiring people if they don't enjoy doing what it is they are going to be doing on a daily basis as part of their job, and do it well. Other things matter too, but that's the A-number-one gating factor for me giving you a thumbs up.
For a software engineering job, if you weren't one of the people who hung out at the computer lab simply because you enjoyed being around the machines and other people who also enjoyed that, then I don't care that you received straight A's for the Visual C++ work you turned in from your home PC without ever interacting with another human being who was interested in the same type of thing, before you went to the frat party and drank yourself stupid.
Work -- and life -- is not something you skate by on, with the minimum acceptable level of effort, so you can do "something you actually like" after it's over.
You may or may not be a skater -- if you aren't, I'm sorry that you're so bad at selling yourself to prosective employers, or that you love doing something you aren't very good at; either figure out a way to address your shortcomings, or pick something *else* you like to do, and do that instead.
But if you are one of those people who picked their career based on a "top salaries" list, and then skated through college on the minimum possible effort to maintain a nice looking GPA, looking for the high paying job at the end of the rainbow, the world is probably better off if you are stuck asking those of us who didn't "Would you like fries with that?".
-- Terry
Re:I think Marx would shit a brick if he could see (Score:5, Insightful)
Options (Score:5, Insightful)
Small Companies (Score:5, Insightful)
One upshot of which is that the companies of the future may be surprisingly small. I sometimes daydream about how big you could grow a company (in revenues) without ever having more than ten people. What would happen if you outsourced everything except product development? If you tried this experiment, I think you'd be surprised at how far you could get. As Fred Brooks pointed out, small groups are intrinsically more productive, because the internal friction in a group grows as the square of its size.
I know from experience (non-trivial engineering projects} that more people does not necessarily equal more success; sometimes it drags down an effort while the original goal gets lost in "management".
Wow, that was a pretty crappy comment. What is always needed is a leader who knows what he's doing, not a cheerleader who has a vague idea of what's going on, and this applies to software as well as making widgets.
I'll trade 1000 "money-making" employees (after IPO) for 10 people that are focused on the goal.
Re:Quit trying to follow the money, and be happy (Score:3, Insightful)
As far as job performance goes, the motivation for doing a good job is irrelevant. Whether you're out to make money and nothing else, or work at the job because you happen to like it, excellent performance is what any sane company looks for. Those who can't perform are fired, period.
When *I* was hiring I took people who could do the job and do it well. Their motivations were beside the point. Quite frankly, because I didn't give a good goddamn how much you 'loved' your job if the guy who came in before you was significantly better at it than you were. That's what hobbies are for.
Max
Everyone can't do what they love (Score:3, Insightful)
There's a distribution of jobs that society needs done. There's a distribution of jobs that people want to do. These distributions are not identical. If they were, half of society would be movie stars, a third would be CEOs, etc.
Certainly you'll be more successful if you do something you love, but not everyone has that option.
Re:I regret to inform Mr. Graham.... (Score:3, Insightful)
And, your net worth is... ?
(I didn't think so)
How is this Offtopic? (Score:5, Insightful)
The moderators must be suffering a severe case of literalism.
And I for one celebrate
Bubble (Score:4, Insightful)
Really what companies were trying to do was to centralize services on the internet, if they had suceeded and been able to keep those monopolies for any length of time their mindshare alone would have been worth the investment.
Many of the companies that accomplished this are increadibly successful (Amazon, Google, MSN, Yahoo etc.)
Unfortunatly they never reached a level of dominance where they could control the advertisers, which was where a lot of income was supposed to come from. Also they didn't understand the idea of the internet which is to sell to everyone with a tiny profit margin(and infintesimal overhead) therby reaping huge rewards, instead they went with the "Spend tonnes of money on marketing then overcharge the consumer" market strategie which is so prevelent today.
There will be another bubble when people begin to think long term. This long term thought bubble may last longer than the short term thought bubble. (I think that's a funny pun, kill me).
Re:I think Marx would shit a brick if he could see (Score:4, Insightful)
His point about the rising power of nerds highlights something of great importance: the "old class relations" that sparked Marxism are essentially dead.
No, they are not dead. Maybe you are just isolated from them. Or maybe you just see what you want to see....
SO many Slashdotters seem to think that everyone is making 80K a year. The facts show that is not the case at all.
year 2000 Average After-Tax Income by Quintile:
80th-100th percentile:$141,400
60-79th percentile: $59,200
40-59th percentile: $41,900
20-39th percentile: $29,000
0-19th percentile $13,700
You can see that the bottom 40 percent take home 29K, and that was at the HEIGHT of the longest boom in a long while. It has gone downhill since then for most people. No class warfare, huh? Well, there should be....
In many respects now there is a symbiotic relationship between the large number of white collar workers and the "capitalist class" which allows for an almost give-take relationship.
Ohh, man. The word is not "symbiotic", but "parasitic". The capitalist class parasitizes the rest of us. And they feed us baloney about how they are the innovators and creators, etc. yakety yakety yak.
What really galls me is that these scumbags take credit for the cumulative effect of scientific research adn engineering. They point to all the electronic consumer goods laying around and say it is all because of the free market that these things exist. Ah, no. Engineering and science improve incrementally because of stored knowledge that builds up over time and leads to improved products. Our improvements in goods are mainly due to that, and not predatory capitalism.
Now I know that some will look to outsourcing and say, see class exploitation still exists!
Oh, yeah, that "exploitation" stuff, it be a thing of the past, dontcha know....
Yes, but it is the fault of the people of many of those countries. If your government is corrupt and you have a democratic system of government, why are your people systematically voting for political parties that keep your country from growing. America's corruption is bad, but it doesn't hinder growth anywhere near that of many developing or stagnate countries.
Absolutely. It is always the fault of those lazy, scumsucking poor people. A few lashes will improve their morale.
Say, didn't I meet you in a prior life? Weren't you the foreman on a Roman slave galley? Or was it that cotton plantation in 1804?
People often want it both ways. They don't want to adapt to a new economy, but they want all of the benefits. You have three choices, and these have existed for most of human history.
The little scum. They can just suck it up....
You can lead, you can follow or you can be dominated. America leads, India follows, others are simply dominated because they refuse to follow the leaders' example and try to grow, and cannot lead on their own, thus another country steps in and economically dominates them. It doesn't mean it's right, but it's a fact of life.
Oh, pardon, i think i feel a vomit coming on....
Re:I take issue with one point... (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with options is they work. They work too well for the upper management. The C*O's should be responsible for the long term growth of the company, they are the check & balance to the shareholders worried about stock price.
When you tie a 5-10X larger benefit to stock price rather than salary - you remove the personal incentive for the C*O's to be the stopgap. Their job in relation to the stockholders is preventing decisions based solely on increasing stock price without regard to longterm profitability.
They are not answer, for exactly the reason Mr Graham states - they reward the wrong thing. But they are fundamentally wrong because they reward the exact opposite of what C*O's need to be rewarded for.
Maybe options should be replaced with something tied more directly to earnings.
Something like profit sharing, or bonuses. These have been around and they work. They are not broken, so why fix it?
Re:Wish I had mod points for parent. (Score:4, Insightful)
a long winded cry for a bygone era (Score:2, Insightful)
Where I disagree... (Score:5, Insightful)
If there's one thing that I think no 26 year old will ever have it's the ability to navigate politics. Deciding what to build next is trivial in comparison to having the gumption to stick with it to get it done. And that requires people motivation skills. That requires tuning out all of the other hype and distraction. Are 26 year olds capable of this? Of course! But the 26 year old who can do this is exceptionally rare. The VAST majority of people only learn these skills over time... and come to realize them in their 40's and 50's.
This is why there are so incredibly few successful companies lead by 20-somethings. Say what you want about corporate america, but in this case, their greed reveals them. The "old boys club" can't motivate nearly as well as the bank. The fact that there are very few 20-something CEO's indicates that, except for the very rare case, 20-somethings don't yet have what it takes. If they did, there'd be no shortage of people following them to the bank.
$.02
Re:bubble? (Score:2, Insightful)
Whereas I live in a country (USA) where highly skilled (or otherwise) people are being fired merely for the fact that they're not. Never thought having been born here would ever become a handicap.
Paul G. is a "one trick pony" (Score:1, Insightful)
I think the value of marketing is as powerful as ever. Without proper marketing the best mouse-traps will fail to make the originator money. Further, brains are a cheap commodity now. A marketing expert can put together an army of coders in India or Russia for pennies. Paul is still living in the 90's. The internet itself changed the nature of the internet since then.
Re:I think Marx would shit a brick if he could see (Score:5, Insightful)
1. the "old class relations" that sparked Marxism are essentially dead
2. The lesson of the modern economy is that businesses need to realize that no part of the company is less valuable than another.
The class relations are alive and well, it's just that statements like the above prove that the class war has been won - by the bosses. Only the working class is convinced there is no working class. Hint: management will never think that "no part of the company is less valuable than another." They spend most of their time attending seminars and classes to reinforce their worth and importance. Where have you been?
You need to read or travel more. If you think class is dead, you have never left the US or your first world comfort, or you have never worked, or you are just talking shit.
the bubble got pricked (Score:3, Insightful)
It absolutely needed that high speed. Where there was no broadbant, the word was, hey, consumers don't need broadband! what's it good for!
Pictures, sound, VOIP, video, computer networking, always on communication, remote access, great big drives to hold that stuff, to back it up, processors to handle it and bigger lightweight screens, wireless communication.... dun!
Al Gore? A superhighway with no off ramps, Al. Doesn't work.
The problem with stock options... (Score:4, Insightful)
The real problem with stock options is not that CEOs are (yes, still today) making millions of dollars per year from options, but options are fundamentally flawed as an accounting measure. When granting an option, the company is increasing the number of shares their company offers, thereby decreasing the value per share from those who already own the company's stock. Furthermore, when creating options the companies do not have to claim them as an expense, as they do, say, employee salaries. So companies can hire employees for less with the promise of options, and reduce their expenses (since salaries are lower and options don't count against expenses), thereby (artificially) raising their bottom line. Who gets screwed in this are the public who purchased the shares at retail price.
Stock options are fine, but only if they are treated as an expense against the company's bottom line.
Re:I think Marx would shit a brick if he could see (Score:4, Insightful)
What has happened in the past when this exact same situation came up is that the smart people who lost there jobs became available to do other things. The same thing will happen this time around. The nerds who are no longer programming will be free to spend their brain power on something else.
Byron Caplan [mercatus.org] puts it like this:
If you replace "downsizing" with "outsourcing" the sentiment is still true. It's detrimental to the economy as a whole to retain workers in the US when there are workers available elsewhere who are willing/able to do the job more efficiently. The US workers are not freed up to do something else and we (as a society) are forced to pay a premium wage for a less than efficient work force.
Each one of us outsources every day. I know of no technologist who also does all of the following:
- makes all of his/her own clothes
- grows or produces all of his/her own food
- builds his/her own house
- self insures against casualty
- produces their own electricty
- obtains, cleanses, and distributes their own water
- etc, etc, etc.
All of those things are outsourced by individuals to someone else. No one has the time to do ALL of that AND be a technologist. So what has happened when they outsourced those activities? It freed them up to be technologists. The same thing is true when the job of technologist gets outsourced to elsewhere. Smart people are freed up to do something else.Re:I hope my boss is reading this... (Score:3, Insightful)
To be fair, there were a lot of 26 year olds with the great idea of getting a bunch of 50 year olds to invest in their bad ideas....
Re:I think Marx would shit a brick if he could see (Score:4, Insightful)
Note that the kind of people who make the decision to outsource jobs have nothing to worry about. They have enough money that if the US sinks into the ocean, they'll just go somewhere else.
Paul Graham = New Jon Katz? (Score:3, Insightful)
With the regularity his screeds are being posted here, and the diviseness they seem to cause, I think he's a definite candidate to the be slashdot's resident ranter.
Re:I think Marx would shit a brick if he could see (Score:3, Insightful)
year 2000 Average After-Tax Income by Quintile:
80th-100th percentile:$141,400
60-79th percentile: $59,200
40-59th percentile: $41,900
20-39th percentile: $29,000
0-19th percentile $13,700
You can see that the bottom 40 percent take home 29K, and that was at the HEIGHT of the longest boom in a long while. It has gone downhill since then for most people. No class warfare, huh? Well, there should be....
You're being misleading if you don't include all the information. You're talking about after-tax income, but we need to know gross income and the tax rates as well to make any sort of judgment. If you gave us the same chart, but the tax rates were from the early 1900s, that would be a completely different thing than tax rates from another era; i.e, I don't think it would be all that bad if the 80th-100th percentile took home 141K if their tax rate was 90% and everyone else wasn't taxed at all. In any case, the bottom 40% probably doesn't have a very high effective tax rate, compared to the top 40%.
Also, this chart doesn't specify what kind of income it lists. If the top quintile takes home 141K mostly from capital gains income, well, that's a different story than a 300K salary.
Finally, averages are funny things -- I never trust averages without other information (like the median). It's nice to see that the 80th-100th percentile is 141K, but if the 99th-100th percentile is 1 billion dollars (e.g., Larry Ellison's $900 million stock sale in Jan 2001), while the 80th-81st percentile is $70K, the average is a little skewed.
Re:I think Marx would shit a brick if he could see (Score:4, Insightful)
My boss only became my boss a couple of years ago. He only gets paid about 15% more than me. We live in the same neighborhood. We have the same level of education. The only "class" differences we have are that I came from the middle class and he came from the urban poor.
I can't get to anyone outside my "class" until I get up to the CEO and CFO, or down to the janitor. Everyone in between from the vice presidents to the landscapers are in the same socio-economic class as I. I know this because we live in the same neighborhoods and drive the same cars and our kids attend the same schools.
Says someone with plenty of money no doubt (Score:5, Insightful)
In the real world real people need money to do real things. Try fucking tell me that I don't need lots of money and I or anyone else should be happy working my arse off earning shit wages the next time their son/daughter/husband/wife needs an operation, or when you want to send kids to school. For that matter if you want to own/rent a decent home you can't go to your bank manager and tell him see I'm not a sell out and expect to get what you need in life. See what a difference $100k will make to a kid's education and then tell me to go do something I enjoy for $30k a year.
If you were doing it for fun and didn't care about making money at it, it'd be a hobby. I'm not saying you should go and do something you absolutely hate for an extra $10k/yr. But if you can make a decent living chances are it won't be fulfilling some passion. You might write business software instead of scientific software for example. Basically you do something RELATED to what you enjoy and realise that to some extent you're going to burn that something as a passion/hobby, because after doing it so many hours a day for so many years you might not be as passionate about it.
People who are only passionate about their work are just as bad as if not worse than those who have other interests outside of their work. They get obsessed with their craft and don't see the big picture, and when something goes wrong at work they have nothing else to keep them happy. That's a one way ticket to bad health, both medical and physical. That's the kind of person that gets suicidal when they leave their job.
The phrase "work-life balance" is one that's often paid only lip service when times are good, but it is absolutely crucial.
IMHO most recruiters, employers and HR departments are clueless. I don't know how many fools I've talked to that just go out to find a candidate that will meet some narrow limited criteria. (You know the kind that wants a candidate who's a fool that'll work 80-120 hour weeks and just happens to have experience with the same goddamn J2EE app server the customer is). The same recruiters wonder why these people act like arrogant asses. The ins and outs of a particular piece of technology can be learnt. Its much harder to break the habbit of being too narrow and focused an individual.
Re:Some good stuff, over-romanticized (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually it seems to me that nerds tend to have a broader range of interests than ordinary people. If you go to the average tech company, it is the developers and not the accountants or legal department or salesmen who are most likely to have travelled to Nepal or to know about Roman history.
Re:Eh...no, he's wrong about one thing. (Score:3, Insightful)
If it were, we'd all be using Excite or Lycos (remember them?) instead of Google.
Re:Says someone with plenty of money no doubt (Score:2, Insightful)
This can be true, but how often? (Score:2, Insightful)
True, some tech folks have interests in everything; they are among the most broadly competent people, and software is merely one of the things that they happen to do well. This broader lifestyle and image should be encouraged.
Unfortunately, this type does not predominate, and the many over-focused types give rise to the stereotype we all know. Note the author's definition of a nerd as "someone who doesn't expend any effort on marketing himself" -- overfocus.
The distinction between the two approaches to life is important, and it is unfortunate that it was glossed over in his article.
Even more important, and more unmentioned, is the fundamental asset that we almost all lack (and I'm no exception), which is an interest in sociopolitical power; We generally view it as a waste of time at best and unethical at worst.
We may be right to value substance, but we are dead right. This is what allows the suits to so mismanage the show, and take (steal) so much of the money. For example, I personally work with one guy who made a few hundred $K in the sale of a company of which he was one of the first 10 employees, but the CEO made $495Million; this wasn't a disparity of technical value, it was one of power management.
What's the fix? It almost seems like it is mutually exclusive -- if you are interested in the real substance of how things work, you aren't interested in power, and vice versa. I suppose we should at least be aware of it...
Re:Quit trying to follow the money, and be happy (Score:2, Insightful)
There's just something nagging in the back of my mind that makes me think that I am not alone.
On the other hand I have an IT job (unix admin) and I used to enjoy my job, but now it's dull and high preasured (if that's possible). Maybe I should have been a lumberjack....
Re:bubble? (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually the term has been used for a lot longer than that. Charles MacKay talks about the "South Seas Bubble" in his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds [litrix.com] way back in 1841.
Re:Quit trying to follow the money, and be happy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I regret to inform Mr. Graham.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Hindsight is always 20/20. It's easy to play armchair quarterback, its quite another to put your money where your mouth is.
No kidding. (Score:4, Insightful)
WRONG (Score:2, Insightful)
It IS valid to consider source motivation in hiring.
If all there was to life was being a productivity unit to serve a money engine then sure, your logic holds. But it isn't. And "how" you are productive does have impact on other peoples quality of life.
Personally, I think the selfish goal of life is to maximize the integral of enjoyment over one's lifetime. The unselfish goal would be to maximize the integral of society's enjoyment. Since when has the golden rule been replaced with "Treat others however necessary to be productive for the corporation"
Re:Greenspan Crashed The Ecnomy (Score:2, Insightful)
The companies that were making real profits and had honest executives are either still around or were bought out to the benefit of their previous owners. The "new economy" investors that lost everything were primarily those who invested in companies run by con-artists.
However, it must be said the the biggest loss over those years was in telecommunications, not Internet start ups. Telecom is a real industry with real products that basically was over invested in and overleveraged (although the corrupt WCOM executives didn't help anything). Other than in the special case of Worldcom, it wasn't anyone's fault per say, just a lot of debt that was taken on to grow companies larger than their customers could support.
Re:P.S. (was Re:I think Marx would shit a brick) (Score:2, Insightful)
By your interpretation of your own statistics, 100% of the housholds take home $141K or less. I think you may need to reinterpret . . .