There's always someone to quote some dry statistic that refutes the lived experience of... pretty much anyone. I wonder, what's the deal with people like this? Is the point to convince yourselves it's not that bad?
Yes, indeed, in the US even a poor person is relatively wealthier than someone in a war-torn African country. But humans are social creatures. We compare ourselves not with "the poor kids in Africa", but with the business owner in the adjacent zip code.
As for "unrealistic" expectations: why do business owners expect to take an unrealistic percentage off the top of everyone's labor? What made them worthy of such a huge amount?
You’re coping hard. The USA is (well, was before tariffs and related) so far ahead and richer than the rest of the “first world” that “europoor” is a correct term for those unfortunate souls who weren’t born there.
OK, let's all celebrate King Bezos shutting down Venice to celebrate his union with his plastic appliance. The suffering of his serfs is necessary to enable this show of excess.
As a founder, I think that this viewpoint misses the reality of a fixed budget. If I can make my team of 8 as productive as 10 with LLMs then I will. But that doesn’t mean that without LLMs I could afford to hire 2 more engineers. And in fact if LLMs make my startup successful then it could create more jobs in the future.
I believe that it’s because people are not investing in bitcoin because it’s a viable cryptocurrency (unlike Ethereum and some others) but that’s it’s a scarce commodity (like gold) that adds diversification to an investment portfolio.
SIRUM (YCW15 Nonprofit) | https://sirum.org | Software Engineer & Product | Atlanta or Remote (US) | Full-time
SIRUM saves medicine to save lives. We make sure that unexpired medicine goes to someone in need rather than polluting our air and water. We are a small but mighty team of 40 people. We are a mission-driven organization that is growing very quickly!
“Work” doesn’t have to be wasteful. It could be based on the number of pieces of litter that were collected, the number of meals to the homeless that were served. It’s just easier to measure when work is something wasteful.
If BTC mining relied on pieces of litter being collected you'd get people spending $millions on factories to produce litter and vehicles to distribute it just so more could be collected. That sounds crazy to type out, but it's no stranger than the situation we currently find ourselves in. The most advanced tools man has ever created are being used to create chips with no practical value, but that are good for converting energy into tokens through pointless calculations.
I don't believe it is possible to create a proof of work system that is not a "proof of waste" once the reward is high.
Spare CPU cycles felt like a waste, that becomes dedicated processing, that becomes dedicated hardware, that eventually became designing custom hardware.
Kim Stanley Robinson proposes this in his recent novel, The Ministry for the Future. He mostly skips the details around how it would actually work though, beyond needing an enormous amount of human labor for verification. In real life, that would break the decentralization of it.
SIRUM (YC W15 Nonprofit) is making medications affordable for all. We’re a small (~25) but quickly growing team that’s passionate about our mission of reimagining healthcare access for those in need.
We come from organizations like McKinsey, the Clinton Foundation, and Stanford Biology. We like to work hard, solve tough problems, and are determined to improve healthcare access for families who have trouble affording the medications they need to stay healthy.
We are currently hiring for both our Palo Alto and Atlanta Offices as well as some fully remote roles. We have opportunities for senior software developers, sales, customer success, operations managers, and communication managers.
If you want to work in health-care, love mission-driven work, and thrive in a startup environment, then we may be a good fit. If you see a position that you like then apply at https://www.sirum.org/about#careers. Even if you don’t see something that’s the right fit right now, email adam -at- sirum.org - we love hearing from folks on hackernews who share our mission.
SIRUM circumvents the traditional medication supply chain by connecting people with surplus medications. Our goal is to leverage the ~$10B of surplus that goes to waste every year to improve health equity for families who need it most. Everyone deserves the medications they need to stay healthy with prices that are low, stable & transparent
As one of the first two full-time engineers, you will work directly with the co-founder/CTO, play a key role in the direction and architecture of our technology, and gain exposure to every functional part of the organization, including all three of our core teams: pharmacy automation, clinic partnerships, and medicine donors.
This makes me think that it at least as much to do with high (unrealistic?) employee expectations as business stinginess.