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SudheerTammini 3 minutes ago [-]
Very well written article, it gets into the core of the problem and explains the hidden patterns. I want to articulate few other variations of this just as a reference.
- The productivity gang, if everyone is so productive and so well organised then what are the outcomes of this productivity?
- Self help - if self help books are solving real problems then where is the need to buy multiple self help books?
- The course trap - if someone is already earning millions dollars where is the need for him to sell $699 course
These are some questions I would ask myself regularly, there is nothing right or wrong because end of the everyone has to servive.
hn_throwaway_99 4 hours ago [-]
This article really felt like a misdiagnosis to me.
Sure, a lot of these people were just buying hype from these "get rich from drop shipping!" influencers, just like a million other suckers who got dollar signs in their eyes with real estate schemes, pyramid sale schemes, yada yada, a tale as old as time. I don't think this "passive income" trap is really anything new, and I don't think it was some unique thing that "ate a generation of entrepreneurs", as if that trap didn't exist then instead we'd see all these successful people.
Instead, what I think has drastically changed over the past 40 years or so is the ability of a solopreneur to make real money. Just look at all the posts on HN asking about how much people make on their side gigs. You rarely see anything more than a couple hundred bucks a month. There are notable exceptions, but unfortunately a lot of those notable exceptions are scammy, spammy business models. It's just simply much harder as a small/smaller business to make money and compete with the big boys. Wealth inequality doesn't just apply to people, but also companies. For example, in the past many entrepreneurial types may have started retail stores, while now it's incredibly difficult to compete with the likes of Amazon et al. I read an article recently that the number of public companies has halved compared to a few decades ago. The Wilshire 5000 stock index, for example, actually only includes about 3400-3700 companies now.
mtlynch 2 hours ago [-]
>You rarely see anything more than a couple hundred bucks a month. There are notable exceptions, but unfortunately a lot of those notable exceptions are scammy, spammy business models.
I suspect this is largely sampling bias.
I host meetups for indie founders, and several attendees earn their living through solo businesses. When I go to conferences like Microconf, I meet lots more.
The problem with measuring financial success by who posts about it on HN is:
* The more someone is making at their solo business, the less they want to blab about it and attract competitors.
* The people earning at the low end are more desperate for people to see what they're doing so they can pick up new customers, so they're more likely to talk about their work.
* The more successful founders are busier and spend less time posting on HN.
jimbokun 6 minutes ago [-]
I note neither your post or the one you replied to contain any quantitative data about how many profitable solo businesses there are.
brunoborges 57 minutes ago [-]
> The more someone is making at their solo business, the less they want to blab about it and attract competitors.
Exactly! And this is why every time I see someone selling a course while bragging about making a lot of money, I know for sure they are _not_ making money.
nemomarx 28 minutes ago [-]
Well you never know, maybe selling the course is the profitable part?
dsr_ 41 minutes ago [-]
> successful founders are busier
I thought it was supposed to be "passive".
Loughla 3 hours ago [-]
We started a trophy and award business because my spouse was already making shirts and stuff so we had most of the equipment. The overhead is really low thanks to quick shipping from a large employee owned national supplier (seriously, JDS industries is fucking awesome).
It's enough to pay for itself easily and pay for a vacation or two a year, for about 4 hours of work a week. If we really put effort in, it could replace our day jobs.
Where most people go wrong is their expectation. We expected this to fund a vacation and maybe car payments. That it's doing that is exactly right and we don't want to take it any further. If people had that view, instead of feeling like they have to make a billion dollars, I think side gigs would be a different beast entirely.
saulpw 3 hours ago [-]
There are many levels between "pays for a vacation or two a year" and "billion dollars". I think most people just want to make a comfortable living (which includes eventual retirement) and not have to work themselves to the bone.
jandrese 2 hours ago [-]
I think the bar has risen for what a comfortable life requires now. Housing costs have outpaced inflation for a couple of decades now. Health insurance has rocketed into the stratosphere, especially in states that dropped the Obamacare subsidies. Even staples like food and fuel are hard to keep up with. Lord help you if you have children and are trying to save for college. Projected costs for universities are getting to "buy a brand new luxury car every year" levels. Not to mention all of the school costs on top of that. It adds up so fast.
bawolff 10 minutes ago [-]
> Housing costs have outpaced inflation
In fairness though, given inflation is the average, housing costs outpacing means something else underpaced.
bilegeek 1 hours ago [-]
I appreciate you setting the bar on necessities. Too many people focus on the... "cheap" "luxuries" like air conditioning, smartphones, internet access.
Loughla 2 hours ago [-]
You can see it in the comments though. Many many many people who fall for get rich quick schemes, whether it's an app or saas or drop shipping or whatever genuinely want that billion dollars.
You can be comfortable on not very much money with realistic expectations while not working yourself to the bone was kind of my point.
rootusrootus 2 hours ago [-]
Indeed, I'd just like to decouple my earning from the whims of corporate overlords who may decide at any moment that I am redundant. I have no serious ambitions to be a billionaire. For that dream I just buy a Powerball ticket once a year or so.
happybuy 3 hours ago [-]
> Instead, what I think has drastically changed over the past 40 years or so is the ability of a solopreneur to make real money.
Hard disagree.
As the article notes, I think if you concentrate on a real business, not a scam-y 'get rich quick scheme' business then, especially with the internet, its never been easier to run a solo business at scale.
For myself, I wrote an app as a side hobby, which then took off, so I started working on it part-time, then moved to full-time when the revenue justified.
It's now growing to where it exceeds what I would have made working for someone else.
Note this took 7+ years of constant work, improvements and care.
It's the type of dedication that makes you competitive with even larger organisations.
And the time required to be a 'success' ensures that you won't have any competitors who just want to make a quick buck or get to "passive income" within a year or two.
nightski 2 hours ago [-]
A real business is simply one that makes money. Not some gatekeeping criteria presented by the ridiculous OP.
Just because you took 7+ years to develop a business does not mean that all businesses require that or that it is the only way.
hunter-gatherer 56 minutes ago [-]
Didn't feel like a misdiagnosis to me. My spouse around 2017 was one of those that got sucked into a course to earn income with an Amazon store. As I read the article basically every point resonated with my experience.
The dog walking business example was also appropriate in my mind. My spouse fortunately broke even, minus time, on her attempt with drop shipping garbage nobody really needs. Now she makes decent money with her oil paintings. Not "passive income" but real money and profit. Not enough to retire (that's what I am for!) but actual money nonetheless.
nitwit005 3 hours ago [-]
The article's example is a person can't even be bothered to understand what the product he's selling is for, and doesn't appear to fully grasp they're losing money. Even in much better circumstances, success would presumably remain elusive.
Some people just lack the capacity for this sort of thing, and unfortunately fraudsters target them by trying to convince them otherwise.
zaptheimpaler 43 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, it feels like the author is blaming his personal bugbear but entrepreneurship and independent businesses are facing systemic issues of massive concentration of market power and zero antritrust enforcement.
VirusNewbie 7 minutes ago [-]
Is it possible this has things backwards?
When I was in high school 25 years ago, unless you got lucky with an IPO, tech didn't pay all that well. (I worked in software while I was in high school, so I know some of this first hand).
It was office space. It didn't matter how smart you were, if you didn't go into management, or join Apple/Microsoft at just the right time, you weren't going to live a rich lifestyle.
Not only that, you'd probably be reporting to some MBA type biz guy who has no idea how software works, you'd not be well respected, and your perks were drip coffee and occasional donuts on friday.
Of course brilliant, hard working, talented engineers said "fuck that" and go build something awesome themselves. Things have changed drastically. Now, brilliant hard working people can literally make millions at dozens of companies .
You will report to another engineer who has slightly optimized for soft skills, you get lavish perks (except amazon, but at least you get paid well there), and real equity.
There's a whole spectrum of options for ambitious software folk that didn't texist ~25 years ago.
bawolff 3 hours ago [-]
I don't think there was ever a time where a solo-entrepenur could make real money without putting in lots of effort and taking lots of risks.
We remember the success stories, we don't remember the bankruptcies.
Marsymars 3 hours ago [-]
> Instead, what I think has drastically changed over the past 40 years or so is the ability of a solopreneur to make real money.
Part of that was accurately diagnosed by the article in the bit about the dog walking business vs dog walking platform.
My partner bootstrapped a successful full-time cleaning business that she ran for a few years and the limiting factor was basically her ability to hire and retain good employees. A physical cleaning business has no path to scale like a tech company though.
bawolff 3 hours ago [-]
> I've met dozens of smart, capable people who had actual energy, and who spent their entire twenties bouncing between passive income schemes instead of building real skills // real businesses // real careers.
The author is acting like it hasn't always been this way. But it always has.
There have always been people who felt the allure of the get rich quick scheme. Its always been true that if they just spent the same effort on doing things properly they would probably make it but instead they bounce from one stupid scheme to the next.
Often its combined with some ideology about how the normal world is full of suckers and they are going to escape by not playing the game. Fraudsters love to target people who want to pull one over on the world. They are easy to manipulate so they usually fall for it when presented with an opportunity too good to be true.
The article, with a couple details about the specific examples changed could have probably been written in victorian times.
recursivecaveat 5 hours ago [-]
I appreciated when "passive income" was the flavor of the week because it was a good signpost for people you could ignore. In particular anybody who didn't understand that you could assign a present value to future income, or that infinite series can sum to finite values. Seriously, the prototypical example of being an author is not particularly passive income lol! A book being print-on-demand indefinitely != infinite income. 99% of copies will almost certainly be sold within a few years, not least due to active marketing on your part. It's very likely to be a worse deal than getting paid a quite modest and disappointing sounding amount up front.
sfRattan 5 hours ago [-]
The way it shakes out is that there's no widely accessible way of escaping actual, ongoing work, which is what unmotivated people actually hear behind the words "passive income." Whatever the industry/vertical/field, a tiny number will hit it so big that they can actually stop working. Everyone else can bolster their income with passive sources, but that passive income ultimately depends on continuing new stimulus into the market (new products/services, more work marketing) to keep the "passive" flow stable.
If you look at the world of indie tabletop RPGs, for example: Kevin Crawford of Sine Nomine Press makes a very good living and a significant percentage of it is "passive" sales of his back catalog. But if he stopped publishing and promoting new game projects, sales of that back catalog would very likely shrivel to nothing within a calendar year.
The open-secret ingredient is always more work.
It's why someone like Crawford can afford to tell everyone exactly how he does what he does... Giving away extensive production files that show you his whole creative process, soup to nuts: 99% of people aren't going to put in the work necessary to sustain the passive portion of an individual income.
toast0 2 hours ago [-]
> The way it shakes out is that there's no widely accessible way of escaping actual, ongoing work, which is what unmotivated people actually hear behind the words "passive income."
25x expenses in s&p 500 works ok. (Adjust the multiplier for your level of pessimism) Funding it isn't easy, but save a good amount of your income for a few decades and control your expenses and you can get there.
sfRattan 2 hours ago [-]
I generally agree, but that basically sounds like prudent investing for eventual retirement. Yes, tune the degree of aggression both in terms of work input and spending restraint, but the "work input" has to be high (and effective) for those few decades.
EDIT: I'm also kind of writing in the context of having your own little economic engine that you own and control, and can be continually running, rather than owning a tiny piece of the abstracted aggregation of an entire economy's engines. That said, dead-simple, low-fee, market-indexed funds are a generally good place to put the surplus fruits of your own little economic engine.
Raidion 50 minutes ago [-]
Creating an additional 30%-50% on top of whatever a normal person would consider passive income in order to actually have passive income is NOT a realistic option for a huge % of the population.
Aurornis 21 minutes ago [-]
> I appreciated when "passive income" was the flavor of the week because it was a good signpost for people you could ignore.
This is why I still do random sampling of Reddit, Twitter, Threads, and a few other social media sites: It’s a good way to keep up with some of the discussion trends that start spreading in online discussions.
I can pick up quickly when someone is parroting the latest info memes from Reddit or Twitter now. It’s very helpful for identifying who isn’t really thinking for themselves and will latch on to the first opinion they see on a topic.
I can’t bring myself to watch TikTok or other video shorts, though.
ghaff 5 hours ago [-]
And that 4 figure advance from a publisher won’t go far either even if you earn it out and get a few royalties.
bluGill 5 hours ago [-]
often the real value of writing a book is you can convince people to pay you to speak. I've had several classes at work where they gave me a book that had everything in the class.
qurren 5 hours ago [-]
> Free to do what? Sit on a beach, apparently.
Quite the opposite for me. I'd like to have freedom to work on things I want to work on without "paying rent", "paying medical bills", or "short term profitability" being a constraint.
dlcarrier 5 hours ago [-]
I went the lean FIRE route, and now work on whatever open-source projects I feel like, plus local in-person volunteer activities. It's a much better quality of life, even though my job had been enjoyable, the extra scheduling flexibility is really nice.
mathgladiator 3 hours ago [-]
Me too. It has been great. Im working on projects that are fundable, and now I have joy from it (did go through a lonely pity party phase).
entropicdrifter 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I'm a musician and a certified audio engineer. I'd rather be writing and recording music than working for healthcare/mortgage costs
TremendousJudge 5 hours ago [-]
yeah, but the guys selling the courses were/are all obsessed with being at the beach
bluefirebrand 5 hours ago [-]
I'm pretty sure that being at the beach is really just universal marketing shorthand for "being somewhere that no one would ever expect you to even reply to emails from"
bawolff 4 minutes ago [-]
Or more generally, just doing whatever you want. I dont think anyone literally wanted to sit on a beach 24/7 365 days a year. However plenty of people would want the ability to just wake up one day and on a whim fly to a hawaii until they get bored then fly somewhere else.
hyperadvanced 5 minutes ago [-]
This is horribly written but largely true.
just-the-wrk 3 hours ago [-]
Have we all forgotten Tim Ferriss' book 'The 4 Hour Work Week'?
It was enormously influential and was likely involved in every one of these failed entrepreneur's ventures
This discussion reads like 'staying inside from 2019-2022 changed social structures' without saying COVID once
aaron695 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
hannahstrawbrry 5 hours ago [-]
"It was an ouroboros that had incorporated in Delaware and was running Facebook ads," is my favorite line I've seen in a minute, great read
zem 5 hours ago [-]
my favourite bit was
8<------------
Free to do what? Sit on a beach, apparently. Every single one of these people wanted to sit on a beach. I've never understood this. Have they been to a beach? There's sand. It gets everywhere. You can sit there for maybe three hours before you want to do literally anything else.
8<------------
I laughed out loud when I read it, because it's so true.
michaelchisari 5 hours ago [-]
Nature is wonderful because it will relax and center oneself while making it clear why we created civilization.
ghaff 5 hours ago [-]
I “retired” about a year ago. Back to actively doing some tech industry analyst stuff with some folks I know. Keeps me as busy as I care to be.
teamonkey 5 hours ago [-]
I would dearly love to be as busy as I care to be.
HeyLaughingBoy 5 hours ago [-]
Right? That's my ultimate goal.
paulddraper 5 hours ago [-]
I love the beach.
Living near the beach is nice.
You can sit on it, walk on it, swim on it, surf on it, run on it, fish on it.
Better than a cement sidewalk, IMO.
zem 5 hours ago [-]
I love the ocean, but I have to confess I don't care much for beaches. sand gets everywhere.
paulddraper 4 hours ago [-]
A lot of beaches happen to be near oceans.
c22 3 hours ago [-]
Fortunately a lot of ocean isn't anywhere near a beach.
quercusa 5 hours ago [-]
Got trapped in an Amway pitch in my teens and have been inoculated against such things ever since.
m463 4 hours ago [-]
You are reminding me about a day decades ago when a guy I met and his wife were sitting in my living room with my gf and I. He wanted to talk science fiction, and his wife and my gf were going to talk about nursing. Seemed like a nice couple until they started talking about "something they were doing" in a mysterious way...
I remember saying, "sounds like scamway or something" and he actually had to say that it was in fact amway he was talking about. uncomfortable.
didn't go much further than that.
Looking backwards I realized how little friction we had getting to know these people, etc... sigh.
pc86 5 hours ago [-]
I wish Amway was bigger so more people would be exposed to it and be similarly inoculated.
bluGill 5 hours ago [-]
At least amway has real product. You are expected to sell to make money in the early years. In 30 years of real work you get a passive income retirement plan - but you need to put in real work selling things to get there.
when you look at the real business model of those who have had success they are still selling the soap in retirement. It is not going to get you rich, but it isn't too bad a life.
well it was - the only people I know in amway are in their 80s and so it may be different.
amway deserves the hate. Truth is it isn't as easy as they tell you.
slyall 5 hours ago [-]
Well it was bigger. But the people who used to get swept by MLMs are now selling drop-shipping, affiliate websites or blockchain.
pdonis 5 hours ago [-]
One thing in the article struck me as way too optimistic:
> What actually makes money hasn't changed. You find something people need. You get good at providing it. You charge a fair price and you keep showing up even when it's tedious and even when you don't want to. You build relationships over years. You build reputation over years.
You can make money doing this, yes--but most people who are really rich don't. There are lots of ways to game the system that don't involve the kinds of wacky things the article talks about.
grebc 4 hours ago [-]
She does just mention passive income covering your monthly spend, which to be fair is not ‘really rich’.
pdonis 2 hours ago [-]
In what I quoted, she wasn't talking about passive income; she was talking about making money by actually creating value. I'm saying it's a shame that our system is set up so people who actually create value don't end up really rich, while people who game the system do.
ggm 15 minutes ago [-]
Back when I was young and motivated about being left wing instead of being old and jaded but still left wing, we called people who lived off other people's work or by profits without effort "rent seeking social parasites"
I like the sound of a "rent seeking social parasite" trap.
As the Mikado says in the eponymous Gilbert & Sullivan opera:
"something humorous, but lingering, with either boiling oil or melted lead."
That was before I became old enough (as I am now) to live off my superannuation and pension, which is also "passive income" but joy of joys, not a side gig. I'm not in denial about where my pension income comes from. It's other people's labour. That's what I'm invested in.
vonnik 5 hours ago [-]
“You can’t cheat an honest man.”
While that isn’t always true, honesty is a great defense against being enlisted in scams that promise easy money.
zem 5 hours ago [-]
this is unquestionably the best thing I've read on hackernews this week, perhaps all this month. should be required reading in high school, for the mental lens it provides.
xivzgrev 44 minutes ago [-]
As the old saying goes: the best way to make money on the internet, is to tell other people how to make money on the internet
NordStreamYacht 2 hours ago [-]
Running an online store isn't "passive income."
Passive income is from rental properties, mutual funds and (my dream) a rich uncle's trust fund.
hellopineapple 1 hours ago [-]
There is nothing wrong with pass income, exchange time for Money by definition has its limit and only when your money compound you still to build savings then wealth. I scroll through half the article and the only under luring reason the author came up with is that dropshipping guy don’t care. People who don’t care have little chance at successful entrepreneurship anyway.
eek2121 5 hours ago [-]
As someone who had actual passive income (small amount, a few hundred USD/mo) prior to my life being ruined by a medical accident: I agree (I killed my site because it was the right thing to do, I could not generate content for it because I couldn't function, so I did not want to waste the time/money of my users).
One thing the author does NOT see, however, is that the local folks doing all the hard work like mowing lawns, building furniture, etc. are in absolute panic over "AI" because their niche little lawn mowing/car washing/house cleaning business has been determined to be irrelevant by ChatGPT, etc. Oh and before you ask, there are folks claiming they can solve that exact thing, and those hard working folks are buying those products, hoping it will solve their downtrend in internet leads.
Marsymars 3 hours ago [-]
> One thing the author does NOT see, however, is that the local folks doing all the hard work like mowing lawns, building furniture, etc. are in absolute panic over "AI" because their niche little lawn mowing/car washing/house cleaning business has been determined to be irrelevant by ChatGPT, etc.
How does what ChatGPT thinks about lawnmowing matter? Like, specifically, who's going to be mowing the lawns if it's not the people who are currently doing it?
redwood 2 hours ago [-]
Sounds like he means the methods that they used to use to advertise to find customers online have broken
stockresearcher 37 minutes ago [-]
I’ve met a lot of “passive income” folks over the last few years, and all of them sounded like their businesses were very actively managed. Never made much sense to me.
I do disagree that all sub$100 blenders are the same, though. But still! The main reason restaurants use Vitamix blenders is that they are so much safer when blending burning hot stuff, like soups. When you turn off a normal blender, you’re fairly likely to create an air bubble that pops a little later, sending drops of very hot liquid into the face/eyes of the operator. A Vitamix, if you turn it off correctly, does not create the bubble. This is irrelevant for most home users, including me. So I don’t have one.
aridiculous 3 hours ago [-]
“The game looks easy, that’s why it sells” - Elliott Smith
yieldcrv 44 minutes ago [-]
I'm partially familiar with this ideology that the author refers to, but I think it's important to separate it from actual passive income:
dividends and treasury bonds give passive earnings, you need capital. the "passive income" savants did not and do not have capital.
case in point: it should not be noteworthy that the author's friend was "$800 in the hole", it should be such a rounding error that it couldn't be any of Joan's concern. And honestly, it probably isn't and Joan put an obsessive amount of weight into an off-comment.
$800,000 in treasuries, on the other hand, now you have passive income - only ~$37,000/yr - but enough to live like a royalty in South East Asia for the next 30 years, passively, followed by getting all $800,000 back.
Class inequality aside, throwing darts at the wall and seeing what sticks isn't a bad business strategy, and you really don't need to be passionate about any particular business idea to collect income.
I hope Joan's friends found something that worked from them. For me its just stay employed so I can accumulate capital for the side projects. Sometimes side projects become bigger than the employment, but my businesses are just expeditions, not forever projects.
I've never watched dropshipping influencers but I did sell some of my own electronics on eBay and noticed some opportunities in the process. Sometimes I put up identical listings as someone else's at a wildly inflated price, and people would buy from me because it seemed more serious. I would buy from the cheaper ad and put my own buyer's address in the shipping destination. Never seeing the product. Not scalable as I think its again the one of the terms, but you can do it between marketplaces too.
fmajid 4 hours ago [-]
Get-rich-quick schemes/scams existed long before this generation.
paulpauper 5 hours ago [-]
Isn't passive income a cornerstone of of the Rich Dad Poor Dad Books? This long predates 2020. I would say selling masks and only being $800 in the hole is a lot better than starting a "regular business" and down $80k-800k.
Glyptodon 5 hours ago [-]
My memory of RDPD was that it preaches getting assets which generate income, not that your management of those assets would be passive. Though obviously it also did have a subtext of "scale some kind of assets that generate income to a certain point and you can pay someone else to do more of the grunt work while you look into a new opportunity."
wj 5 hours ago [-]
You’re right. Books like the Four Hour Workweek and Escape From Cubicle Nation were guides to passive income twenty years ago.
ghaff 5 hours ago [-]
It’s not totally risk-free income (but what is) but a decent pile invested sensibly makes for pretty good passive income depending on your goals.
bluGill 5 hours ago [-]
now where do you get that pile to invest? I have a pile invested - but I'm close to retirement and it took me many years to save it up.
ghaff 4 hours ago [-]
By working and investing. More successfully at some points than others. But you’re totally right that different people are better set up and more or less inclined to move on from a job than others.
ryandrake 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, it was the exact same scheme. Rich Dad Poor Dad was basically "Buy lots of cheap, crappy houses and become a slum lord" expanded into thousands of pages of books, seminars, and self help guides.
datadrivenangel 1 hours ago [-]
and Kiyosaki has declared bankruptcy at least once!
qzw 27 minutes ago [-]
There really should be a special category for business books written by people who’ve gone bankrupt. I know at least two well known examples, but there’s got to be a whole lot more.
b00ty4breakfast 5 hours ago [-]
I've been hearing about "passive income" for at least the last 10 years, and I reckon it goes back further than that.
enraged_camel 5 hours ago [-]
Side note: after drowning in LLM-generated content, it's pretty refreshing to read something written by a human. They're a pretty good writer, too!
dlcarrier 5 hours ago [-]
Who needs LLM garbage when you have MLM garbage?
jazz9k 6 hours ago [-]
Passive income are just get rich quick schemes that were common decaded ago.
I started a business like this, but it wasn't passive. I shipped everything to my office before inspecting and shipping product out.
It lasted almost 10 years with 1 million annual revenue.
It was not passive.
Ifkaluva 5 hours ago [-]
Sounds like you were running an import and distribution business. Not the same thing as drop shipping :) as the drop shipping people will joyfully tell you, “you’re not supposed to touch the product”
mrdependable 5 hours ago [-]
Dropshipping is just logistics. There is a lot of dropshipping that has nothing to do with ordering off Alibaba.
QuercusMax 5 hours ago [-]
the inspection part is a big deal. drop shippers don't add any value, but inspecting the goods (and rejecting those that don't meet spec) actually adds value.
mlmonkey 2 hours ago [-]
I blame Tim Ferriss and his "4 hour work week" book. I belive he talks about selling vitamins and letting some guys in India manage his site. Doesn't get his hands dirty. (This is from memory, so please forgive any misconceptions about it).
TZubiri 2 hours ago [-]
There's a type of similar trap for devs, not necessarily a passive income trap because most go for a saas and accept the infinite-version release cycle.
What some devs usually fall for ( not by watching some youtube video, but by falling into the idea organically on their own as a kind of emergent behaviour ) is doing the minimal effort of a saas, like a template of the necessary part without adding the actual value.
The way this most often presents itself is a payment proxy, think about the minimal requirements for any software service, it charges money, so that's where they start, a stripe account, maybe an LLC, payment links or payment tables, they can now charge money. Then they make a frontend, a website, of any kind, this comes first, not to serve some kind of need, a landing page, and the actual product is a landing page as well, use react as well because that's the thing you do.
Finally, what is computing, it has something to do with data, so let users upload some images or videos, then you let them charge users for it. Bam, you have now reached the same app SaaS that millions of indie devs developed, like a patreon thing, an OnlyFans if you allow that shit, a gumroad. A host that allows uploaders to charge money.
If you don't even want to go through the hassle of hosting the images or content, you can just let the users upload a link, and charge for that
Must be thousands of these Linktree, campsite, taplink, patreon, cafecito, matecito, tecito.
The dropshipping thing is similar to this but it has a physical component, the idea of a business is just the minimal core, a caricature conception of what a business is, you buy a thing, and you sell it for more.
bitwize 5 hours ago [-]
"Passive income" as your only financial salvation is one of those memes that broke off from the MLM "tool scam" industry, that is, selling courses, seminars, and other training materials to people in MLMs on the pretext of teaching them sales, marketing, and business, but it's really just brainwash material designed to keep them from leaving. The other big one is positive thinking/the law of attraction/"The Secret". If MLM is the kaiju, these are the spider-things that fell off the Cloverfield Monster's body and started killing people in the subway tunnels. But like how Robert Smith performed with Siouxsie Sioux as "The Glove" while still fronting The Cure, these memes have built plenty of side scams while still enjoying friendly partnership with MLM itself.
add-sub-mul-div 5 hours ago [-]
It's like the flood of AI shovelware projects being spammed here daily.
Were these the people who were really going to do anything substantive anyway? Or just the shortcut-taking types?
5 hours ago [-]
homeonthemtn 5 hours ago [-]
>But zoom out and what you had was just an enormous machine converting human ambition into noise.
Ah, the story of a generation
entropicdrifter 5 hours ago [-]
Just one?
toyg 3 hours ago [-]
Indeed. In the case of music-obsessed boomers, that saying rings true in a very literal way.
secretsatan 6 hours ago [-]
Met a guy that ran some dropshipping thing in a bar once, once he found out i was a programmer he kept on trying to get me to fix his website for free because it was easy, would not take no for an answer. I just kept upping how much money i would charge him till i got sick of it and left.
I knew a few guys like that in crypto too, before crypto came along and they got into that, this guy told me he’d written a twitter app, it was a bot that pumped gold at some influencers command. Spurred me to write an app though.
nobleach 5 hours ago [-]
"My nephew makes websites, and he's 14... I could just have him do it"
- Every client of mine during my contracting days. It took me way too long to reply with, "Oh that's great news! I wasn't sure of my availability, and was certain I was going to be way too expensive. Glad you got it figured out."
dpb001 35 minutes ago [-]
I think the 14 year old nephew has been around for every iteration of technology - there are probably clients now threatening to just have their nephew vibe code the thing you're trying to spec out.
Once, when fed up with this during a discussion on a small moonlighting job I said "Yeah, kids are pretty good with this stuff these days, Tell you what - have him get started and I'll be available to give him any help he needs at 2x my rate".
davidw 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I don't think I could do a pure 'passive income' thing with no 'soul' to it, but there is something to be said for building a business that runs and makes money even when you are asleep or on vacation. This is something that some 'passion businesses' where it's all about the founder and their skills, fail to do.
fred_is_fred 5 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure passive income is the right way to describe a drop shipping operation where you have to interact with customers. Passive income is $VT.
cucumber3732842 6 hours ago [-]
Everything I'd want to do on a "side gig to iron out the kinks and then eventual business" basis is regulated to the point where that path is economically impossible and the only way to be in the black is to take out a big f-ing loan, quit your job and go all in on your new business. And it's not just me, all my buddies have this gripe. We've all got skills and experience and equipment outside our immediate careers and we'd like to use those to provide value to people but there's just no way to do that inside the rules and none of us our interested in risking our retirements operating outside them.
I just upped my retirement contribution and decided that the big evil BigCos can do all the value creating and the finance middle men can have their take.
I guess that's the reason everyone does the slumlord or VRBO thing.
mothballed 5 hours ago [-]
Where I live out in the country there are a lot of people with those kind of businesses. They bring you the goods and services to/from in a truck. If you ask to look at what they have... they have no address and won't tell you anything more than their goods/services dropped from the sky. At that point, I don't try to probe further... if I am happy I would rather not know.
cucumber3732842 3 hours ago [-]
>Where I live out in the country there are a lot of people with those kind of businesses. They bring you the goods and services to/from in a truck. If you ask to look at what they have... they have no address and won't tell you anything more than their goods/services dropped from the sky.
Yeah there's a fair amount of that here too.
Thinking about it on a meta level I think on the "low end" it's basically just a hack around how expensive employees are when you consider exposure. Sure you could have your $15/hr guys stay late and power wash your box trucks, deep clean your facility, etc, but some guy with a van will come in and do it on the weekend for a flat fee and if he falls off the ladder that's not your problem.
And on the high end it's a hack around overhead. You can have some guy show up on a jobsite, set up a tent to keep predatory eyes off and weld up the broken thing on your backhoe or the rental company calls that guy and repairs it on your job site without telling you giving you deniability. No expensive compliance costs of adding hot work to your job site or running a shop where that stuff happens regularly.
>if I am happy I would rather not know.
Always better to be able to say you don't know rather than "I asked and the answer seemed fishy but I didn't probe".
faanghacker 6 hours ago [-]
This article has a narrow definition of passive income, limiting it to these low-barrier-to-entry schemes. Other parts of the FIRE world have emphasized being a landlord or flipping houses, for example.
I personally made it happen by working a FAANG SWE job for 13 years, not getting sidetracked by the startup cult, saving and investing 70% of my after tax income, etc. And no I didn't get into crypto, but I still managed to make it with conventional investments.
In fact, I chose to pursue a career in the tech industry in order to pursue financial independence in the first place. Because I knew back then (circa 2005) all the tech Kool aid was BS. That "don't be evil" was just a facade. And time has proven me right and my haters wrong, those who thought it was unethical for me to place wealth building ahead of career building.
It's been four years since I've been out of a job. Now I'm creating more passion oriented content. I'm never bored.
zem 5 hours ago [-]
> those who thought it was unethical for me to place wealth building ahead of career building.
that might well be the first time I've seen "career" and "ethical" conflated in that way. I've definitely seen the people who think you're a fool and possibly a sucker if you chase short term wealth over career stability, and there's definitely a veneer of unethicalness clinging to the notion of get-rich-quick, but I cannot understand how "establish yourself in a career" is an ethical concern.
faanghacker 3 hours ago [-]
Keep in mind that for me it was before the FAANG companies became the new evil tech overlords, and to some extent even before the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. Back then it was much easier for naive young college students or new grads to buy into that narrative of using our talents to make the world a better place through professional careers.
HeyLaughingBoy 5 hours ago [-]
> thought it was unethical for me to place wealth building ahead of career building
Twelve year olds?
faanghacker 5 hours ago [-]
High achieving college students.
paulpauper 5 hours ago [-]
This is the way. There is huge survivorship bias when it comes to start-ups, even AI start-ups. When it comes to wealth creation, it's hard to beat a 20-30% CAGR with big tech stocks since 2010 or so, which was doable.
georgemcbay 6 hours ago [-]
"Passive Income trap" wantrepreneurs haven't really gone away, they have just shifted to crypto rug pull culture and now prediction markets and app-based gambling.
They'll keep existing as long as the root cause that creates them (massive wealth inequality in general and the growing delta between productivity and wages) exists, so probably until our financial systems fully collapse in about 2032.
ryandrake 5 hours ago [-]
These people migrate like geese through the exact same stuff. I knew a couple of people way early on into affiliate marketing, then they all migrated to LeadGen, then to Drop Shipping, then online poker, then crypto, then NFTs, and now of course, they're all doing AI gigs. It's the exact same group of people migrating like birds from scheme to scheme.
conorcleary 2 hours ago [-]
I think this is what the 'forest for the trees' phrase is getting at...
laughing_abder 2 hours ago [-]
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yoyohello13 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
coredog64 5 hours ago [-]
"Rent seeking" has a specific definition* and it is not "I use large capital investments to generate regular payments". Buying housing with the intent of renting it is not rent seeking.
This is Wikipedia, which is as good as most other definitions: Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth
michaelchisari 5 hours ago [-]
There is rent-seeking, rent extraction and the rentier class. All are a part of the process of enclosure. Landlords are included in this but it may not seem that way because enclosure happened so long ago.
valiant55 5 hours ago [-]
In what way does buying a property and renting it create wealth? Isn't buying a property with the intent to rent it manipulation of economic conditions?
pc86 5 hours ago [-]
If you think buying a house and renting it out "manipulates economic conditions" you need to prove it because that's a claim, especially with regard to "manipulate."
lotsofpulp 5 hours ago [-]
The manipulation is in the political limit of housing supply and the limit on land value tax rates.
jeffbee 5 hours ago [-]
The homevoter hypothesis is mostly nonsense. There isn't a coordinated, conscious effort to restrict the supply of homes based on rational expectations of excess returns. People restrict the supply of homes due to misguided aesthetic reflexes, racism, nostalgia, and a bunch of other stuff, not because they are mustache-twirling capitalists.
db48x 5 hours ago [-]
Yes. The land is wealth, the house is wealth, and _living in_ the house is wealth. Like it or not, not everyone can afford to buy a house. Maybe they don’t have a down payment, or can’t get a good interest rate on a mortgage. Instead of renting money and using it to buy the house, they need to just rent the house instead. If there were no rentals available of any kind, they would go homeless¹. Having them renting something instead of going homeless makes wealth for both them and for society as a whole.
¹ We’ll just assume that homesteading is impossible these days.
5 hours ago [-]
butterlettuce 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
OrderlyTiamat 5 hours ago [-]
Not necessarily. I rent my house, and the housing corporation who I rent from are not rent seekers, they provide a service to me which I'm happy with, and which they invest in.
They could've bought up the land and house and not improved it at all and depend on the housing crisis deepening for increased resell profit- but they did not do so, they maintained this house I'm in and ensured me and future tenants can continue enjoying this place. That's not rent seeking.
People who can't afford to buy a house need a place to live too. Believe it or not, there are people who buy houses with the intent of renting them out to those people, to actually help them.
didgetmaster 4 hours ago [-]
Let me guess..you have an equal disdain for people who own hotels, rental cars, or work as an UBER driver.
All these things involve renting out something to fill a temporary need.
em-bee 5 hours ago [-]
i could not afford the capital investment to buy a house, and i am not interested, it would only lock me down. my family once bought an apartment. we lived there for a few years. the mortgage payments were twice as high as the rent would have been. when we moved out we were told the place could not be sold. the family still has the place and it is probably still empty. lots of money wasted.
when you buy a house with the intent to sell it for a profit, then you are driving up housing costs. i'd say that's even worse than renting it out.
jeffbee 5 hours ago [-]
Why? There are loads of people who can afford to rent a house but can't afford to rent a million dollars. I genuinely cannot understand where this hatred of people who rent out houses comes from.
beloch 5 hours ago [-]
Rent seeking is for those who already have capital and can use it to influence those with political power. "Passive income" is for those who don't own capital. One works. The other... often not.
lotsofpulp 5 hours ago [-]
I don’t think it’s even spin, it’s just the jargon the IRS uses. And wanting to make money while you sleep has been a thing long before 2015.
5 hours ago [-]
grebc 4 hours ago [-]
Thanks for posting, great article and I read one of Joan’s pieces earlier this week without realising.
- The productivity gang, if everyone is so productive and so well organised then what are the outcomes of this productivity?
- Self help - if self help books are solving real problems then where is the need to buy multiple self help books?
- The course trap - if someone is already earning millions dollars where is the need for him to sell $699 course
These are some questions I would ask myself regularly, there is nothing right or wrong because end of the everyone has to servive.
Sure, a lot of these people were just buying hype from these "get rich from drop shipping!" influencers, just like a million other suckers who got dollar signs in their eyes with real estate schemes, pyramid sale schemes, yada yada, a tale as old as time. I don't think this "passive income" trap is really anything new, and I don't think it was some unique thing that "ate a generation of entrepreneurs", as if that trap didn't exist then instead we'd see all these successful people.
Instead, what I think has drastically changed over the past 40 years or so is the ability of a solopreneur to make real money. Just look at all the posts on HN asking about how much people make on their side gigs. You rarely see anything more than a couple hundred bucks a month. There are notable exceptions, but unfortunately a lot of those notable exceptions are scammy, spammy business models. It's just simply much harder as a small/smaller business to make money and compete with the big boys. Wealth inequality doesn't just apply to people, but also companies. For example, in the past many entrepreneurial types may have started retail stores, while now it's incredibly difficult to compete with the likes of Amazon et al. I read an article recently that the number of public companies has halved compared to a few decades ago. The Wilshire 5000 stock index, for example, actually only includes about 3400-3700 companies now.
I suspect this is largely sampling bias.
I host meetups for indie founders, and several attendees earn their living through solo businesses. When I go to conferences like Microconf, I meet lots more.
The problem with measuring financial success by who posts about it on HN is:
* The more someone is making at their solo business, the less they want to blab about it and attract competitors.
* The people earning at the low end are more desperate for people to see what they're doing so they can pick up new customers, so they're more likely to talk about their work.
* The more successful founders are busier and spend less time posting on HN.
Exactly! And this is why every time I see someone selling a course while bragging about making a lot of money, I know for sure they are _not_ making money.
I thought it was supposed to be "passive".
It's enough to pay for itself easily and pay for a vacation or two a year, for about 4 hours of work a week. If we really put effort in, it could replace our day jobs.
Where most people go wrong is their expectation. We expected this to fund a vacation and maybe car payments. That it's doing that is exactly right and we don't want to take it any further. If people had that view, instead of feeling like they have to make a billion dollars, I think side gigs would be a different beast entirely.
In fairness though, given inflation is the average, housing costs outpacing means something else underpaced.
You can be comfortable on not very much money with realistic expectations while not working yourself to the bone was kind of my point.
Hard disagree.
As the article notes, I think if you concentrate on a real business, not a scam-y 'get rich quick scheme' business then, especially with the internet, its never been easier to run a solo business at scale.
For myself, I wrote an app as a side hobby, which then took off, so I started working on it part-time, then moved to full-time when the revenue justified.
It's now growing to where it exceeds what I would have made working for someone else.
Note this took 7+ years of constant work, improvements and care.
It's the type of dedication that makes you competitive with even larger organisations.
And the time required to be a 'success' ensures that you won't have any competitors who just want to make a quick buck or get to "passive income" within a year or two.
Just because you took 7+ years to develop a business does not mean that all businesses require that or that it is the only way.
The dog walking business example was also appropriate in my mind. My spouse fortunately broke even, minus time, on her attempt with drop shipping garbage nobody really needs. Now she makes decent money with her oil paintings. Not "passive income" but real money and profit. Not enough to retire (that's what I am for!) but actual money nonetheless.
Some people just lack the capacity for this sort of thing, and unfortunately fraudsters target them by trying to convince them otherwise.
When I was in high school 25 years ago, unless you got lucky with an IPO, tech didn't pay all that well. (I worked in software while I was in high school, so I know some of this first hand).
It was office space. It didn't matter how smart you were, if you didn't go into management, or join Apple/Microsoft at just the right time, you weren't going to live a rich lifestyle.
Not only that, you'd probably be reporting to some MBA type biz guy who has no idea how software works, you'd not be well respected, and your perks were drip coffee and occasional donuts on friday.
Of course brilliant, hard working, talented engineers said "fuck that" and go build something awesome themselves. Things have changed drastically. Now, brilliant hard working people can literally make millions at dozens of companies .
You will report to another engineer who has slightly optimized for soft skills, you get lavish perks (except amazon, but at least you get paid well there), and real equity.
There's a whole spectrum of options for ambitious software folk that didn't texist ~25 years ago.
We remember the success stories, we don't remember the bankruptcies.
Part of that was accurately diagnosed by the article in the bit about the dog walking business vs dog walking platform.
My partner bootstrapped a successful full-time cleaning business that she ran for a few years and the limiting factor was basically her ability to hire and retain good employees. A physical cleaning business has no path to scale like a tech company though.
The author is acting like it hasn't always been this way. But it always has.
There have always been people who felt the allure of the get rich quick scheme. Its always been true that if they just spent the same effort on doing things properly they would probably make it but instead they bounce from one stupid scheme to the next.
Often its combined with some ideology about how the normal world is full of suckers and they are going to escape by not playing the game. Fraudsters love to target people who want to pull one over on the world. They are easy to manipulate so they usually fall for it when presented with an opportunity too good to be true.
The article, with a couple details about the specific examples changed could have probably been written in victorian times.
If you look at the world of indie tabletop RPGs, for example: Kevin Crawford of Sine Nomine Press makes a very good living and a significant percentage of it is "passive" sales of his back catalog. But if he stopped publishing and promoting new game projects, sales of that back catalog would very likely shrivel to nothing within a calendar year.
The open-secret ingredient is always more work.
It's why someone like Crawford can afford to tell everyone exactly how he does what he does... Giving away extensive production files that show you his whole creative process, soup to nuts: 99% of people aren't going to put in the work necessary to sustain the passive portion of an individual income.
25x expenses in s&p 500 works ok. (Adjust the multiplier for your level of pessimism) Funding it isn't easy, but save a good amount of your income for a few decades and control your expenses and you can get there.
EDIT: I'm also kind of writing in the context of having your own little economic engine that you own and control, and can be continually running, rather than owning a tiny piece of the abstracted aggregation of an entire economy's engines. That said, dead-simple, low-fee, market-indexed funds are a generally good place to put the surplus fruits of your own little economic engine.
This is why I still do random sampling of Reddit, Twitter, Threads, and a few other social media sites: It’s a good way to keep up with some of the discussion trends that start spreading in online discussions.
I can pick up quickly when someone is parroting the latest info memes from Reddit or Twitter now. It’s very helpful for identifying who isn’t really thinking for themselves and will latch on to the first opinion they see on a topic.
I can’t bring myself to watch TikTok or other video shorts, though.
Quite the opposite for me. I'd like to have freedom to work on things I want to work on without "paying rent", "paying medical bills", or "short term profitability" being a constraint.
It was enormously influential and was likely involved in every one of these failed entrepreneur's ventures
This discussion reads like 'staying inside from 2019-2022 changed social structures' without saying COVID once
8<------------
Free to do what? Sit on a beach, apparently. Every single one of these people wanted to sit on a beach. I've never understood this. Have they been to a beach? There's sand. It gets everywhere. You can sit there for maybe three hours before you want to do literally anything else.
8<------------
I laughed out loud when I read it, because it's so true.
Living near the beach is nice.
You can sit on it, walk on it, swim on it, surf on it, run on it, fish on it.
Better than a cement sidewalk, IMO.
I remember saying, "sounds like scamway or something" and he actually had to say that it was in fact amway he was talking about. uncomfortable.
didn't go much further than that.
Looking backwards I realized how little friction we had getting to know these people, etc... sigh.
when you look at the real business model of those who have had success they are still selling the soap in retirement. It is not going to get you rich, but it isn't too bad a life.
well it was - the only people I know in amway are in their 80s and so it may be different.
amway deserves the hate. Truth is it isn't as easy as they tell you.
> What actually makes money hasn't changed. You find something people need. You get good at providing it. You charge a fair price and you keep showing up even when it's tedious and even when you don't want to. You build relationships over years. You build reputation over years.
You can make money doing this, yes--but most people who are really rich don't. There are lots of ways to game the system that don't involve the kinds of wacky things the article talks about.
I like the sound of a "rent seeking social parasite" trap.
As the Mikado says in the eponymous Gilbert & Sullivan opera:
"something humorous, but lingering, with either boiling oil or melted lead."
That was before I became old enough (as I am now) to live off my superannuation and pension, which is also "passive income" but joy of joys, not a side gig. I'm not in denial about where my pension income comes from. It's other people's labour. That's what I'm invested in.
While that isn’t always true, honesty is a great defense against being enlisted in scams that promise easy money.
Passive income is from rental properties, mutual funds and (my dream) a rich uncle's trust fund.
One thing the author does NOT see, however, is that the local folks doing all the hard work like mowing lawns, building furniture, etc. are in absolute panic over "AI" because their niche little lawn mowing/car washing/house cleaning business has been determined to be irrelevant by ChatGPT, etc. Oh and before you ask, there are folks claiming they can solve that exact thing, and those hard working folks are buying those products, hoping it will solve their downtrend in internet leads.
How does what ChatGPT thinks about lawnmowing matter? Like, specifically, who's going to be mowing the lawns if it's not the people who are currently doing it?
I do disagree that all sub$100 blenders are the same, though. But still! The main reason restaurants use Vitamix blenders is that they are so much safer when blending burning hot stuff, like soups. When you turn off a normal blender, you’re fairly likely to create an air bubble that pops a little later, sending drops of very hot liquid into the face/eyes of the operator. A Vitamix, if you turn it off correctly, does not create the bubble. This is irrelevant for most home users, including me. So I don’t have one.
dividends and treasury bonds give passive earnings, you need capital. the "passive income" savants did not and do not have capital.
case in point: it should not be noteworthy that the author's friend was "$800 in the hole", it should be such a rounding error that it couldn't be any of Joan's concern. And honestly, it probably isn't and Joan put an obsessive amount of weight into an off-comment.
$800,000 in treasuries, on the other hand, now you have passive income - only ~$37,000/yr - but enough to live like a royalty in South East Asia for the next 30 years, passively, followed by getting all $800,000 back.
Class inequality aside, throwing darts at the wall and seeing what sticks isn't a bad business strategy, and you really don't need to be passionate about any particular business idea to collect income.
I hope Joan's friends found something that worked from them. For me its just stay employed so I can accumulate capital for the side projects. Sometimes side projects become bigger than the employment, but my businesses are just expeditions, not forever projects.
I've never watched dropshipping influencers but I did sell some of my own electronics on eBay and noticed some opportunities in the process. Sometimes I put up identical listings as someone else's at a wildly inflated price, and people would buy from me because it seemed more serious. I would buy from the cheaper ad and put my own buyer's address in the shipping destination. Never seeing the product. Not scalable as I think its again the one of the terms, but you can do it between marketplaces too.
I started a business like this, but it wasn't passive. I shipped everything to my office before inspecting and shipping product out.
It lasted almost 10 years with 1 million annual revenue.
It was not passive.
What some devs usually fall for ( not by watching some youtube video, but by falling into the idea organically on their own as a kind of emergent behaviour ) is doing the minimal effort of a saas, like a template of the necessary part without adding the actual value.
The way this most often presents itself is a payment proxy, think about the minimal requirements for any software service, it charges money, so that's where they start, a stripe account, maybe an LLC, payment links or payment tables, they can now charge money. Then they make a frontend, a website, of any kind, this comes first, not to serve some kind of need, a landing page, and the actual product is a landing page as well, use react as well because that's the thing you do.
Finally, what is computing, it has something to do with data, so let users upload some images or videos, then you let them charge users for it. Bam, you have now reached the same app SaaS that millions of indie devs developed, like a patreon thing, an OnlyFans if you allow that shit, a gumroad. A host that allows uploaders to charge money.
If you don't even want to go through the hassle of hosting the images or content, you can just let the users upload a link, and charge for that
Must be thousands of these Linktree, campsite, taplink, patreon, cafecito, matecito, tecito.
The dropshipping thing is similar to this but it has a physical component, the idea of a business is just the minimal core, a caricature conception of what a business is, you buy a thing, and you sell it for more.
Were these the people who were really going to do anything substantive anyway? Or just the shortcut-taking types?
Ah, the story of a generation
I knew a few guys like that in crypto too, before crypto came along and they got into that, this guy told me he’d written a twitter app, it was a bot that pumped gold at some influencers command. Spurred me to write an app though.
- Every client of mine during my contracting days. It took me way too long to reply with, "Oh that's great news! I wasn't sure of my availability, and was certain I was going to be way too expensive. Glad you got it figured out."
Once, when fed up with this during a discussion on a small moonlighting job I said "Yeah, kids are pretty good with this stuff these days, Tell you what - have him get started and I'll be available to give him any help he needs at 2x my rate".
I just upped my retirement contribution and decided that the big evil BigCos can do all the value creating and the finance middle men can have their take.
I guess that's the reason everyone does the slumlord or VRBO thing.
Yeah there's a fair amount of that here too.
Thinking about it on a meta level I think on the "low end" it's basically just a hack around how expensive employees are when you consider exposure. Sure you could have your $15/hr guys stay late and power wash your box trucks, deep clean your facility, etc, but some guy with a van will come in and do it on the weekend for a flat fee and if he falls off the ladder that's not your problem.
And on the high end it's a hack around overhead. You can have some guy show up on a jobsite, set up a tent to keep predatory eyes off and weld up the broken thing on your backhoe or the rental company calls that guy and repairs it on your job site without telling you giving you deniability. No expensive compliance costs of adding hot work to your job site or running a shop where that stuff happens regularly.
>if I am happy I would rather not know.
Always better to be able to say you don't know rather than "I asked and the answer seemed fishy but I didn't probe".
I personally made it happen by working a FAANG SWE job for 13 years, not getting sidetracked by the startup cult, saving and investing 70% of my after tax income, etc. And no I didn't get into crypto, but I still managed to make it with conventional investments.
In fact, I chose to pursue a career in the tech industry in order to pursue financial independence in the first place. Because I knew back then (circa 2005) all the tech Kool aid was BS. That "don't be evil" was just a facade. And time has proven me right and my haters wrong, those who thought it was unethical for me to place wealth building ahead of career building.
It's been four years since I've been out of a job. Now I'm creating more passion oriented content. I'm never bored.
that might well be the first time I've seen "career" and "ethical" conflated in that way. I've definitely seen the people who think you're a fool and possibly a sucker if you chase short term wealth over career stability, and there's definitely a veneer of unethicalness clinging to the notion of get-rich-quick, but I cannot understand how "establish yourself in a career" is an ethical concern.
Twelve year olds?
They'll keep existing as long as the root cause that creates them (massive wealth inequality in general and the growing delta between productivity and wages) exists, so probably until our financial systems fully collapse in about 2032.
This is Wikipedia, which is as good as most other definitions: Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating public policy or economic conditions without creating new wealth
¹ We’ll just assume that homesteading is impossible these days.
They could've bought up the land and house and not improved it at all and depend on the housing crisis deepening for increased resell profit- but they did not do so, they maintained this house I'm in and ensured me and future tenants can continue enjoying this place. That's not rent seeking.
All these things involve renting out something to fill a temporary need.
when you buy a house with the intent to sell it for a profit, then you are driving up housing costs. i'd say that's even worse than renting it out.