Back when every person in the office required their own secretary to do the work that they now do with Saas, did you call secretaries rent-seekers?
Saas is productivity growth at work. Rent-seekers add no additional productivity to the economy, they diminish it. Saas is the opposite.
Are there individual examples where Saas companies might be providing negative value? Of course (I assume somebody will respond below with one such personal anecdote).
A previous employer of mine had paid 96k a year to use a client software on a per database installation basis (12k per license, 8 database installations across the company worldwide, for a total cost of 96k/year)..
However this software was a trivial CRUD app we used for dealing with CAD files. To be clear: we completely owned and managed the back end database ourselves, and just used the app as a client interface for searching/creating CAD files (which was super slow btw).
I could've created an equivalently functional client app within a week or two, that was both faster and more scalable. Doing so would have saved the company an obvious 96k a year in recurring costs, along with increased productivity. It might have taken a while longer than a week to deploy to users, but nonetheless would have alone justified my yearly salary. Additionally it wouldn't have taken 100% of my time a year to support or maintain such a client.
However, I couldn't convince managers it was worth it to rewrite it in house, despite no new features being added to the software by the vendor for over 8 years! Frankly, I'm still not sure why that was (ignorance I'd say), but I think it said how much I was respected there... so I left.
Actually, I lied - I still work there and am in the process of finding a new job. Frankly, it's stuff like this that makes me think I should just get with the times and start my own niche SaaS company and do "Rent-Seeking" to ignorant companies such as this, since they don't understand when something is cheaper to be done in house...
Loving Mailbrew so far, but it's too half-baked at the moment for me to be willing to pay $10/month for it. For context, I happily pay for 1password, fastmail, workflowy, notion, stratechery, NYT, Spotify, blackblaze, 2 VPNs and countless other subscriptions so I am not your average cheap bastard on reddit.
It doesn't even support producthunt, indiehackers, designer news, etc. yet. I'd also love for the ability to scrape and detect updates to websites that don't actually have RSS feeds (no idea how to achieve that technically, but that is something I'd pay $10/month for).
I love Tailwind but hate having to deal with build tools and purgecss and package management and [insert modern workflow hassle] just for a little side project.
Is there anything similar to Tailwind that doesn't require any build process?
It's like my desire for quality CLI apps and APIs before any sort of fancy schmancy GUI. The important part is reminding one's self that the other 99% of people want and need the GUI version of the app.
In fairness, all start-ups are "run like a circus." That's the point of a start-up--to figure out new/better ways of doing things. Most of the time it doesn't work, and then you try something else.
If you want the stability and reliability of Harvard, don't get your education from a scrappy upstart.
This is true. I suppose I was being a bit hyperbolic.
Having said that, it still seems like a bad deal even for students who get jobs. If the curriculum is not up to par, it's likely that successful students would have also been successful with self-teaching or less-expensive online courses. There's also the opportunity cost of being out of work for 9 months.
It seems unfair to treat your students as guinea pigs for iterating a startup - especially when you're already often targeting desperate people.
Not about lambda, but I had the opportunity to read the full details of an ISA contract from other school and there might be some times when student will be mandated to payback even if they don't get a job. Related to this: someone in Reddit is trying to collect the docs..
Anybody have experience as to whether this applies to an American living in Finland?
Due to FATCA and the US's draconian tax laws around ownership of foreign investment assets...I'm wondering if it wouldn't make any sense to try to start a Finnish company while holding American citizenship. Assuming it would be a tax nightmare if you start producing any real income.
The requireMenus start on day one, regardless of producing any income. What follows related to the US tax code in general, the us/Finland tax treaty might make exceptions about some of them:
You will be unable to hold any financial asset other than cash or deposit (no broker will let you do stocks for example - or an ETF)
You will have to report and pay taxes on the fantasy gains on your locally accumulating pension funds, even though you will not have access to them until retirement (if then).
You will have to file your company paperwork locally, but also as if it was American - with requirements that become more onerous with your ownership percentage (starting at 10% or 25%, can’t remember - luckily for me in that respect, I was below the reporting threshold most years - but I did have to translate and file financials at some point)
I had done all of these for many years. If you don’t enjoy the bureaucracy, you might be better off NOT owning a non-US company.
I don't see why not. In fact, it would be "cheaper" for them because they do not need to pay the value added tax to your non-EU company. Sure they'd get that eventually back from the tax office if they were paying just another Finnish company, but it would still take a bit of time.
The problem isn't that you don't make your own toilet paper. It's that an oddly high percentage of people you're competing against for the most desirable jobs do make their own toilet paper.
By contrast, you appear less appealing as a result. If all you want to do is show up to the mill and get paid, stop applying at all the most prestigious mills. There's thousands of more humble mills that could use your help outside the valley--and they don't mind if you buy your toilet paper at the store.
Right I guess I forgot that the same position at a fancy company is somehow worth more because the company name is part of the FAANG acronym.
You can't pretend that there aren't plenty of non "prestigious" companies that do this. Frankly the fact that any company would judge you based on "oh, you don't spend your unpaid time doing work that we consider important?" is absolute bullshit, no matter the "reputation" of the company.
These jobs are just another cog in the wheel job for christ sake, stop putting companies on a pedestal just because of their name.
Furthermore, if you're applying for a "desirable" role and you don't have any previous experience and NEED to use a github profile to show yourself off, it's clear that the only thing making this role "desirable" is the name on the fuckin company building which, again, is a bullshit reason to consider a job "desirable".
Otherwise, a "desirable" role would be one that could be a senior role in a field that you already have experience in, so your actual work experience should be plenty of evidence for your worthiness for the position and you shouldn't need any outside hobby code to show that you're qualified.
Whatsapp's dominance everywhere outside the US has nothing to do with the generous texting plans here. These were common all over Europe as well. The reason the US has been slower to transition to data-based texting is due to our size and the rarity of Americans traveling internationally.
Imagine if every state in the US was a different country. That's basically Europe. Say you got charged roaming fees every time you traveled from New York to Connecticut. This was true in Europe until they passed regulation that mandated compatibility.
Wi-fi had no roaming upcharge. Hence why texting that works over wi-fi became the default.
Bookmark OS comes close for me, but the ugly UI ruins the experience. Nothing is more annoying than the Russian doll experience of seeing a hacky version of macOS doubled up inside of the chrome of your actual OS.
Love Raindrop in theory (design-wise they have the right idea), but I dumped it in practice due to the fact it's too bloated and buggy and runs much slower than just keeping my bookmarks on Safari.
Pinboard, while being minimalist which I love, is minimalist in the wrong way. The visual hierarchy is all over the place and impossible to decipher through. Scanning down a list of bookmarks is painful.
So I've largely just been using the standard bookmarks feature in safari--which is actually refreshing and awesome.
Except when I do that, I can't sync bookmarks to other browsers. I use Chrome on mobile and sometimes on desktop.
Except, most companies make the world a better place. On the whole, private enterprise is almost entirely responsible for humanity's rise out of impoverished suffering over the past 200 years. The global interconnected nature of private enterprise is the reason we don't have as much warfare anymore, and why the world is safer than it's ever been in all of history.
I don't think Google's internal troubles are due to attracting people who want to "make a difference." I don't see employee activism getting out of hand at medical device companies where the products they make literally save lives. Nor do I see these same issues at non-profits.
> The global interconnected nature of private enterprise is the reason we don't have as much warfare anymore, and why the world is safer than it's ever been in all of history.
That’s a reach. Global interconnected private enterprise was widespread before both ww1 and ww2. We haven’t had a war between major global powers after ww2 because of MAD and Pax Americana.
That depends on your relative definition of "widespread." Was globalization widespread in 1919 compared to 1819? Absolutely.
But the globalization of our collective economies in 2019 is dramatically higher than it was in 1919.
Also, how was the US able to fund the massive buildup of arms and the Manhattan Project...which ultimately led to Pax Americana and MAD? By taxing the massive wealth generated by private enterprise.
Warfare is down even between nations who wouldn't fall under the definition of MAD (no nuclear weapons programs). How do you explain that if not for the aligned incentives created by a global economy?
This is a completely backwards and incorrect perspective on history. Funds from taxing private enterprises were not what funded the war and the postwar boom; on the contrary massive Government deficit spending sustained both the war and the postwar economic boom.
On the contrary, the idea the US government created this money from nothing is the backwards perspective. How does government deficit spending happen? Via the sale of debt (ie. Treasury bonds).
The reason people are willing to buy US government debt is because they are confident the US government will be able to pay them back, with interest. Why are people confident in the US government's ability to pay...and where does this money come from? The strength of the growing US economy and the money the government will derive from taxes on this growth.
Or conversely, let's look at what the US government spent that money on: supplying the war machine via US industrial capacity. That industrial capacity wasn't created out of thin air. Take a look at Detroit for example. Absent the existing industrial capacity enabled by the automotive industry, the allies would likely have not won the war.
Both the ability of the US government to deficit spend, and the things they spent that money on, were a direct result of the strength of the US's private enterprise.
There is absolutely nothing about private enterprise that enabled deficit spending or confidence in US’s future. The War Department collaborated very closely to retool existing industries and also help create entirely new ones by sharing technology and designs with the private contractors; it could have simply nationalized them and there would literally be 0 change in confidence in US treasury bonds. Fundamentally, the distinction on how you choose to organize your means of production doesn’t really matter all that much, and certainly doesn’t matter as much as you seem to believe.
The fact that USSR was able to ramp up its industrial output, maybe not as high as USA but much higher than most other countries, refutes your point that private enterprise was not really needed for war effort. Because USSR, due to communism, had no private industry.
If you include the millions who died in various famines as well as those that were executed directly by Stalin, the number of victims of the USSR has been estimated to be anywhere between 6 and 15 million people.
The Soviet Union has to be the worst counterpoint to anybody arguing against private enterprise.
Saas is productivity growth at work. Rent-seekers add no additional productivity to the economy, they diminish it. Saas is the opposite.
Are there individual examples where Saas companies might be providing negative value? Of course (I assume somebody will respond below with one such personal anecdote).
However, in aggregate, Saas is not rent-seeking.