I enjoyed the piece.
Personally, I want no part of it, but I think it might work well for people who are not me.
I've always been "on my own." My life really is a series of watersheds, where I've been the only person to believe in me, before the event, and a whole bunch of folks seemed to believe in me, after the fact. Not a particularly good setup for selling "Chris-Tokensâ˘."
Not a bad thing, in the long run. It hurt like hell, the first few times, but I realized that I don't have the personal skills to "sell" myself (like being able to spew jargon, sound like I'm TED-talking all the time, or beat LeetCode tests), so I can't blame folks for not wanting to "invest" in me. It is what it is. I come across as a socially-awkward dork, so people don't take me seriously. I'm actually fairly good at what I do, but If I mention that, it comes across as "arrogant," despite the enormous ocean of hubris that pretty much defines today's tech scene. I don't really have the skill to "humble-brag."
It taught me to live a conservative lifestyle, be Honest and Honorable, do top-shelf work, bust my ass, and not expect much from others.
I couldn't rely on anyone else to clean up my messes, or get me out of jackpots. It has taught me to learn what I have needed to learn, despite active roadblocks being tossed out by "gatekeepers," and it also prevented me from getting mixed up with some truly awful disasters; both personal, and business.
It's not a character flaw or lack of skills in not being able to "sell yourself". It's a sense of dignity and pride as a working person.
You are not a commodity, you are a human being. You may look like a commodity to a business owner, but you refuse to allow yourself to become one.
Honesty and honor are worth more than money. There is money to be made in making yourself into a sort of corporate dog, but it will leave you feeling empty inside.
I am definitely not politically conservative, but I live in a conservative way as well. I don't think it's superior, but it's nice to have peace and stability.
> You are not a commodity, you are a human being
You know who else talked about the commodification of labour? M- is dragged off stage by angry HN audience
(Seriously, this is an interesting and important discussion to have - the dignity of labour and non-financial values - and it's interesting to watch a number of conflicting arguments made here which have been made loudly and vehemently by various historical figures)
> You know who else talked about the commodification of labour? M- is dragged off stage by angry HN audience
I mean HN is the news aggregator for ycombinator, an entrepreneurial startup incubator.
Doesn't mean there aren't good points there, but this is a tech news site for technology capitalists. This is the culture that gave us hackathons and death marches and veneration of guys like Steve Jobs.
M who?
It's conservative only if you think of this ongoing extreme financialization of everything as progress.
I am not really sure of what it is you call honor though. To me it is a word whose meaning I don't really understand whose main purpose seems to justify leaders in sending people to their death at war and by men to justify murdering women/other men. It is at best anachronic, at worst dangerous. (Of course I am not accusing you of promoting murder but that's a word that has a sad history and I hope we get rid of it in the context of our daily lives )
I personally like this definition, from one of Lois Mcmaster Bujoldâs books: â Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself.... The friction tends to arise when the two are not the same....There is no more hollow feeling than to stand with your honor shattered at your feet while soaring public reputation wraps you in rewards. That's soul destroying. The other way around is merely very, very irritating.â
Well, this is a really weak argument. Honor is inward looking, about the individual and whether they can live with themselves.
>that's a word that has a sad history and I hope we get rid of it in the context of our daily lives
Please dont start that cancel culture nonsense because the word has previously been used in a way you don't like. You are a symptom of a society that lacks personal and community values to live by, believing mockery of pursuing the narrow, straight path. Im not talking out of my anus either, Im guilty as much as anyone here of perpetuating tech that has and will prostitute whole generations of people in ways never seen in human history. Think a little before you write.
Honor just means doing the right thing, and it is also the respect you receive for doing so. The history of the word just means being a good person.
Honor in terms of death and politics is often a manipulated distortion of what is right.
Doing the right thing is often difficult, and this notion is used to manipulate people into killing each other.
There is honor in not selling your dignity for money, or in doing the right thing when it is unpopular or difficult.
There is no honor in killing people to enforce an oppressive power structure. It's about your personal choices, it's not inherently political.
Not sure if you are talking to me, or the parent.
I used the word "Honorable," as it seemed more effective than "Integral" (as in "having Integrity).
As far as I know, that word isn't on any blacklist. If it ends up there, I'll find an alternative.
In the meantime, I'd gently suggest that accusing decent folks of supporting the murder of female children might not be the most effective way to start good relationships.
Can you eat honor? Can you sell it? What is the worth of a man besides his ability to profit? Seeing endless people of honor scrape out meagre existences while those who exploit others endlessly become billionaires is more enlightening to the worth of honor than our useless platitudes.
I think the issue here is that youâve tied a monetary value to honor, when honor is often tied to other things and occasionally explicitly the lack of a desire to maximize profit.
Can you eat profit? What is the worth of a man besides his honor? What profiteth a man if he gaineth the whole world, but loseth his soul?
Itâs a fair question. Iâd say that if/after youâve made your millions you may soon find that your life is no less empty, and that internal substance - however intangible - is all there is. The exogenous manifestations of it are honour, duty, morality and so on. I think the Stoic literature best explains it if ever youâre interested.
Can you eat or sell happiness? What about contentment, satisfaction, meaning or purpose?
I mean, no skin off my back if you want to frame yourself as a cog in the economic machine, but surely there's more to life than materialism?
Am I perhaps misunderstanding your post and are you instead making a point about the disposable nature of men as a gender group?
> I don't have the personal skills to "sell" myself
Actually you do. You've demonstrated them in this very comment. Maybe you don't realize this, or maybe your self-deprecation is a deliberate part of your strategy. Either way, it worked on me. This comment led me to your profile, which led me to your company web sites, which impressed me. I don't need an iOS app developer at the moment, but if I did you'd be at the top of my list of people to contact.
To reiterate, it is very likely that those people who passed on you or didn't become interested due to the lack of self-marketing are not the people you would want to work with and doubly are not actually offering the job you thought you were applying for.
Grifters interview and hire grifters because their org/team/company relies on the grift more than the truth to make ends meet. If you can't grift, you frankly don't have the skills for that job. It's an unfortunate side-effect of the nature of grifting that they can't tell you this upfront.
My fear with this mindset of "They're people i wouldn't want to work with anyway" is that it's easy to say that when i'm not hungry.
If my mortgage is on the line my desire for a paycheck increases. Perhaps i don't live simply enough - but i'm always concerned about stability and until i'm retired i will always be concerned about the next paycheck. I too lack skills to feel confident about common interviews, but i look at this as a fault. If i felt more confident about interviews perhaps i'd feel more confident about my stability.
One of my favorite bosses got summarily fired for getting tired of the grift and telling a customer we were still in analysis on something that the founders wanted them to think was well underway. This wasnât the first time and our code was on the way to intractable due to layers of expediencies.
When a bunch of us quit 18 months later, we had stuck around for 6 months for a bonus that worked out to about 7-8 weeksâ pay. As we sat around having a beer down the road, I asked if it was worth it to stay the extra six months. Almost 3/4 said no.
OP took the high road and the much harder path. All you have to do these days is put all your skill points into Charisma and bullshit your way through an entire career. No other skills needed. Look at Elizabeth Holmes and that WeWork guy. People were falling over themselves giving them money. Generational wealth achieved by having no ability bedsides running their mouth. Even normal jobs, so many people just blah, blah, blah their way through the interview and the job, and then by the time anyone checks, they're off to do it again at a different company.
Itâs getting harder and harder to teach my kid that honor, integrity and hard work are still important, when you can easily find counter-examples, and they are more and more becoming the norm.
I ended up working in sales for an investment bank and found out exactly how true this is...
I had the exact same sentiment. I'm a sucker for these types of reflective, self-deprecating descriptions for oneself. And good for him as well, because I don't doubt his honesty at all.
> I don't doubt his honesty at all.
Neither do I. That the mark of a truly great con artist ;-)
> I don't have the personal skills to "sell" myself
Your comments do just that, though. Perhaps writing is a good medium for you to make the point to others -- I recommend you do more of it. It makes a great first impression, from which you can follow-up. Be genuine in person as you are in your writing.
Thanks.
I like your site (> I wear many hats, but graphic designer is not one of them).
This looks cool: http://graceofgodmovie.com
Looks like you're a great conversationalist.
> Looks like you're a great conversationalist.
Thanks. That, too, is a learnable (and teachable) skill. It did not (and still does not) come naturally to me. Took me about 20 years of concerted effort to really figure it out (and I sometimes lapse even now). But in retrospect well worth the effort.
Hello Chris, I wanted to say that I found your comment extremely good especially this
> I'm actually fairly good at what I do, but If I mention that, it comes across as "arrogant," despite the enormous ocean of hubris that pretty much defines today's tech scene.
Thanks!
I agree probably since my experiences were similar. Things are much better now, but I don't remember people telling me 'here is some money; remember me when you make it big'.
There are definitely people who would benefit from this. Some of my friends would have said 'some people just put everything in their char stat'. In fact, I have this HS friend. When we were growing up, he could barely turn his PC on. Now he is an IT manager for a major US brand. He either has gotten better or he was able to BS everyone with his cool guy persona ( and he is cool ). In short, I would buy his personal IPO.
Hey, Alex Masmej here. Just wanted to say that I had no choice because I had no money in the bank. During the start of COVID, I lost my only (and very first) source income at the time, and I lost all my savings in crypto (DeFi is dangerous even to crypto people like me).
Financially, this ISA freed me instantly, and gave me a newfound legitimacy as a crypto innovator. This was by far the best way I could find to break out as an entrepreneur.
Does nobody in here realize that this is just the first step towards the well-known as well as rightfully-abolished concept of slavery?
Fraction of future income and participation in "certain life decisions" is just the beginning. In principle this can ramp up to all future income and all life decisions.
And don't tell me this is voluntary, which makes it all different from slavery. Alex himself writes "I had no choice". Just take this further and apply it to some drone worker in an Amazon fulfillment center or other precarious employment. People who don't have a choice and would end up uneployed and hungry on the streets if they don't agree to terms put in front of them. The only thing between the worker and such a deal is labour laws, and we all know how popular those are in "entrepreneur" circles.
I've encountered something like this in a work of fiction, Mary Doria Russell's The Sparrow. In the book, investors find young, brilliant but impoverished children, usually in crisis-struck places (war, civil strife, etc). They sponsor the young people's top-tier education and earn their salary when they become professionals, the sponsored only receiving a stipend necessary for living until their debt is paid off.
Interestingly, if I am gifted child in a neglected place selling myself would be a way to get out. Limited options make a bad looking options look good.
There is a lot of room between drone worker, saying you "had no choice" and actually having no choice, to both sides, but people that begin with the picture of a top down unmovable hierarchical structure of employment, and life in general, will never see that. Employment is no slavery. It is not easy, but it is not slavery.
I'm not saying that all employment is slavery. Far from it. A good employment arrangement is mutually beneficial. The employer gets a loyal worker that is productive, creative and motivated. The employee gets relative safety, a reasonable compensation and a sense of purpose.
What I'm saying is that the described scheme of Income Sharing Agreement is a step towards a dark age. Saying that it's always a choice is ignoring realities and just buys into the myth of "If you're poor then it's just because of your poor choices. Your fault." In the average western society, especially the U.S., there is a lack of social mobility that goes directly counter to that myth and can't just be explained by people making poor choices, compared to societies where mobility is higher.
You had no choice but go to the most expensive place in the world ?
Kudos to you. Itâs a new and innovative technique, seems like it could help many more people, and you showed how it would work in practice. I thought being able to do the crypto trade directly on you website was a nice touchâdefinitely shows its easier and more accessible than the Bowie Bond example from the article.
How have things played out since the initial sale?
https://defimarketcap.io/token/0x8ba6dcc667d3ff64c1a2123ce72...
Market cap is now almost $1 million with a coin price of $0.15. Considering the initial offer was $0.002 per ALEX it seems like he's doing really well.
Of course he's now running a NFT startup https://tryshowtime.com so perhaps the 15% share of his income has the potential to max out at the $100k return he offered. I don't think I'd bet against him at this point.
Thereâs literally nothing in this article that you couldnât replace âtokenâ or âcoinâ with âcontractâ or âmembershipâ and have it work exactly the same. The idea of selling contracts against future income is interesting but putting the blockchain here is yet another solution in search of a problem.
Iâm usually in total agreement about blockchain just being stuffed anywhere, but observationally, there must be a good reason why blockchain shows up in these situations so often. Thereâs definitely the hype factor, but blockchain does have value in that itâs reasonably trusted by average people (perhaps unlike signing a contract everytime you wanted to purchase a piece of a creator - coins gamify it), and itâs easy to setup trust systems - Alex setup his own token in a weekend for a âhuman IPOâ, rather than running through the cost and time of properly setting it up with a lawyer and contracts.
Maybe blockchainâs biggest value proposition right now is that itâs lightly regulated and has hype, so using it greases the wheels when growing an audience or building a usually regulated product.
> blockchain does have value in that itâs reasonably trusted by average people
I don't think you and I would agree on what constitutes "average people".
> itâs easy to setup trust systems - Alex setup his own token in a weekend for a âhuman IPOâ, rather than running through the cost and time of properly setting it up with a lawyer and contracts.
Easy to set up, but how easy it is it to enforce?
Author mentions the ponzi scheme, and quite right. As long as the general trust is there and the investments are on the up and up youâre fine.
But the insidiousness is once youâre in, youâre in. Once you bought 4000 Tupperware to resell (insert any pyramid scheme here) , you canât find fault in it, and when it crashes youâre burned.
I donât want to bash blockchain, there might be interesting use cases, but I havenât seen it yet in itâs current implementations.
It's sort of useful for sending money to Asia without losing 1.5 to 5% on transaction fees, but that doesn't involve actually investing in it
> that itâs reasonably trusted by average people (perhaps unlike signing a contract everytime you wanted to purchase a piece of a creator - coins gamify it), and itâs easy to setup trust systems
This is absolutely backwards though; the contract is enforcible, whereas the coin isn't. If Alex simply chooses not to pay back his investors, nothing happens other than a loss of face.
> itâs lightly regulated and has hype
Exactly.
The incentive here is economic, not some governmental force. If some company stopped paying dividends, the stock price would crash. Some governmental entity coming in after the fact and forcing the company to pay dividends would be null at this point as the company would most likely be bankrupt. The same thing would happen here, the price of alex would crash to nothing making the other 90% that he owns worthless.
does blockchain solve the trust problem here though? my trust issue would be that the person doesnt report their entire income, or purposely delays deals past the term, which is all out of band of the coin
The only trust problem that blockchain solves is that of transaction settlement. Anything else requires a hybrid solution with a trusted third party.
I get the point of the shocking title.
But what he describes, hedging risk, is not a new concept. It is something that people do every day when they diversify investments or buy insurance. ISAs and "person as tokens" just push this to new levels.
> In such a scenario, every career becomes a pyramid scheme.
In other words, the rich get richer--scalability works.
One thing the author left out (or that I missed) is that scalability increases overall wealth. If I have to learn calculus from an average teacher because of geographic limitations, and then my child gets to learn from the best calculus teacher in the world, in the latter case the world gets richer because the same knowledge is arrived at quicker at less expense. (Of course, there's fallout for the average worker, but this is something we've been dealing with in the developed world for decades and still haven't figured out.)
Itâs protocol-ized finance. Sure you can do it all old school, but that takes a ton of effort and makes your situation a unique snowflake. If you do it the way everyone has agreed on with tokens, all of your tokens plug into the existing infrastructure, is standardized, and makes the cost of capital go down.
Why people continually canât understand this, and keep saying âbuh buh buh mysql and lawyer fees! No need for blockchain!â is a failure of imagination.
> Sure you can do it all old school, but that takes a ton of effort and makes your situation a unique snowflake.
Many of the situations required in this article still require real-world contracts to make them work. The crypto tokens are additive on top of the contracts, but they don't replace contracts.
Someone could sell you an NFT that represents 15% of their future earnings over the next 3 years, but the blockchain can't enforce that. Even if we had all payments occurring on the blockchain, the person could simply create a new blockchain wallet and give their new address to future employers, claiming $0 earnings for their original blockchain address. The NFT itself is only valuable if supported by the weight of real contracts in the real world with real enforceability.
Crypto tokens only stand alone when the crypto token itself is being traded. Actual value still requires consensus that the token is worth something (Bitcoin, Ethereum) or a real-world contract that stipulates that whoever holds the token has a claim to some actual rights or asset.
It's likely that most of the real-world contracts for something of actual value have stipulations that the crypto tokens are null and void if determined to be lost or stolen. The crypto tokens are largely a distraction.
I think the point is that smart contracts allow a handful of things to happen automatically, while real-world contracts are literally just words on paper that have no functional capability of effecting anything in reality. People interpret those words with the understanding that they can invoke a court of law to borrow the stateâs monopoly on force and compel behavior in accordance with the contract, but itâs still humans reading the words and then actually doing the actions of their own will.
In any case, itâs not hard to imagine an evolution in our legal regime where tokens can gain the force of legal contracts. And then tokens will do everything that paper contracts will do, which is to say nothing except declare the terms of some mutual agreement between some meatspace entities. (obviously this only makes sense for fungible contracts)
I think this entire idea is insane, but that's not the argument.
>Many of the situations required in this article still require real-world contracts to make them work. The crypto tokens are additive on top of the contracts, but they don't replace contracts.
There is no duality of 'real-world contract'/'digital contracts'. The question is if a digital document and signatures are accepted by a judicial system. In 50 years every judicial system will accept some format of digital contracts.
The potential upside of 'tokenized' and standardized/automated legal documents are: less ambiguous interpretations, automatic resolution, simpler trading, and easier cross-border contracts ( to some extent ).
All of this is possible by human hands, but legal systems are not known for their digital innovation. ( They don't even use standard 'diffs' to negotiate contracts )
Standardized contracts trade all day every day on exchanges all over the world. Thatâs how everyone doing legitimate business has agreed to do it. Thatâs where the existing infrastructure is. Thatâs where serious capital is.
Tokens, on the other hand, are the favorite tool of scammers.
How is a large insurance company refusing to pay on a legitimate claim any less of a scam?
I donât think cryptocurrency is near mature enough to replace traditional contracts, but technology changes a lot in 5-10 years.
Youâre 100% correct. Which is also why I found the article thought provoking!
Blockchain isnât magic. It canât do very much ânewâ. But if it can take something old (contract) and make that more accessible to more potential contract buyers/sellers, then thatâs actually interesting.
Technology that makes slow complicated things fast and easy can have a lot of impact.
I wonât be selling shares of myself nor buying shares of others. But this weâre close to the point where blockchain actually provides real value beyond tulip speculation.
Itâs just more top signals. Thereâs too much money floating around if people want to invest in nonsense like this. When equities correct from the current Shiller PE ratio higher than 1929 I think you will find less people want to invest in a career token for someone.
https://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe
The Bowie Bond part of the post was fascinating by the way. Had never heard that story. He issued them in 1997 which is a high Shiller PE value also before the 2000 stock bust. Lots of money floating around looking for a home then too.
>When equities correct from the current Shiller PE ratio higher than 1929 I think you will find less people want to invest in a career token for someone.
The government is actively preventing a correction by minting new dollars at unprecedented rates [0]. In this environment, the Shiller P/E doesn't make sense anymore.
The pressure in the society is building up and it's gonna eventually blow up, but it will follow some completely unexpected path because the usual safety valve has been welded shut.
[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/money-supply-m0
I totally agree. We are already past where a correction should have occurred. They are just delaying and making the inevitable crash more violent with money printing. Like a volcano that hasnât erupted for a long time.
I agree that there's a ton of money floating around / frothiness, but what's inherently wrong or ill-advised about investing in future cashflows of a person. Assuming you diversify across a bunch of people in a bunch of fields, this actually sounds better than some of the stuff people are investing in in the stock market.
Because having a share in an individual sounds very much like slavery?
So does usury.
You loan someone $40000 @ 5% APR and he spends it on education. If the loan is to be paid back in a decade, he has to cough up $416 per month. Unlike a mortgage, he can't foreclose on his education.
Since he doesn't have any assets to sell, and is by law unable to get out of them through bankruptcy, his only choice is to work some amount of hours every month to pay off the loans.
If that is not slavery, then surely ISAs are fine too? And if that is slavery, then how are ISAs any worse?
but it's not like slavery because you can quit at any time. Outside of blockchain contracts should be considered 'Slavery' because an 18 year old can take out a loan that ruins his whole life because he is forced to pay back the loans by some outside entity. Investing in an individual via the blockchain makes it so you are investing because you believe in the individual, but at any time the individual can simply stop working, stop earning and enjoy a simple life without any repercussions. This makes the investment more risky for sure, but stops it from being slavery because a.) the individuals don't have to be worried about some gun forcing them to do something b.) i can sell my tokens at any time.
But itâs voluntary slavery, like BDSM play
edit: man you people cannot take a joke
>Thereâs too much money floating around if people want to invest in nonsense like this.
Alex had his human IPO shortly after the march 2020 crash
We went through the 2008 financiy crisis and this is what people think is a good idea?
How long before people are trading options on risk weighted batch of people? Leveraged buyouts if whole specialties? Movement controls to enforce greatest P/E? "I'm sorry sir, you can't leave the country without presenting a Holiday Risk Bond. Perhaps a Virtual Vacay is more affordable?"
And most of all: you, as an individual, have almost no information about the market, and are almost certain to get a bad price.
Anyone who thinks they are good at this should practice buying a new car. Once you get to the final sale price, with no finance, demand another 9% off. If you can get that, and the car isn't a lemon, you're ready to negotiate for a well understood commodity.
Selling people futures, when you've just given them capital up front with the goal of enabling higher returns, is less understood, though of course there are many immigrants who do just that. But already wealthy people? It seems much less certain.
> How long before people are trading options on risk weighted batch of people?
Lol I actually love this idea. Funding an ETF of people who want to move to SF to start a career in tech, or LA to start a career in acting. Diversify your risk and support some people with potential. Could have an acting school equivilant of ycombinator and you can invest in all each batch and get a return if some succeed.
If we want a metiocracy this could help build it, by giving more capital to those who have potential but are disenfranchised by existing institutions.
Yes but remember 2008? All those loans that turned out to be sub-prime? All those complex risk products no one really understood?
So, instead of Indian SWEs and 3rd sons of teachers you thought you were investing in for grad school, you're paying people to be swindled at Trump University and indentured training for long haul trucking.
Meanwhile the YC30 talent bonds were sold to a select group of connected investors, and pension funds bought job lots of Invisalign techs from brokers making a steady commission.
Have people forgotten the classic way of investing in humans?
Social programs.
In Denmark part of my taxes goes to pay public pensions, and when I get old taxes will fund some pension for me.
The public pension isn't huge, so yes, almost everybody has a private pension scheme too.
My private pension is exposed to global stock performance over ~30 years.
My public pensions is exposed to value of humans in Denmark in ~30 years.
So in a way I do have exposure to some human investment :)
This is also why it makes sense for my taxes to fund tuition for everybody.
So Denmark would forcibly take more than half of my income to invest in stuff I don't have a say on, while no one is held accountable by competition and economic incentives.
I'll pass.
I pay 30% of my income in taxes.
I get, in no order:
- free transportation (free high quality high-ways, train network, subway, tram, bus, rent-a-bike...),
- free education for myself and my children, from pre-kinder garten up to university.
- paid very high-level education (PhD, postdoc) for myself and my children,
- free health-care for everyone,
- universal salary for everyone (no homeless people around, extremely low crime rates)
- free sport offerings, open-air health activities, safety sport training (climbing, skiing, ...)
- free internet,
- free cable TV,
- all the usual stuff (garbage collection, street cleaning, access to water and power networks, etc.)
Of course, "free" does not mean "free", since I'm paying all of this with my taxes.
But how many taxes do you pay, and what do you get from them?
Because what I get is that my biggest worry in life is "How will the weather look like at the weekend?" and "Depending on that I might go hiking, or cycling, or surfing, or skiing...".
I don't worry about my children, or school, or being able to pay for anything, or crime, or security, I don't worry about my 6 year old son taking the subway and a bus alone to go to primary school, or them making it back home safely, or my 16 year old daughter going partying till 5am and then walking home alone at night, or what happens if they break an arm and need to go to the hospital, or whether I can afford the university they want to go to, etc.
Like, really, my only worry in life is "What's the weather like and what am I going to be able to do in the weekend depending on the weather".
Which country is this? 30% seems reasonable for all that.
Most folks don't pay that much in tax, and I'm guessing that your state taxes, federal taxes, insurance premiums, and deductible is more than whatever tax rate you'd be paying in most countries that charge similarly.
It isn't like you get a real say in where your taxes are spent in any country, honestly, and part of paying taxes is that they get spent on some thing you don't like. Not only that, but no one is really held accountable by competition in most things that taxes pay for (health care and infrastructure and a safety net aren't held accountable because of economics since someone always has leverage and they are easily monopolies as the choice isn't real).
> So Denmark would forcibly take more than half of my income to invest in stuff I don't have a say on..
If you could invest in humans, you'd want a diversified portfolio anyways. Indeed to keep operating costs low, you might want a passive investment scheme, like index funds.
Paying taxes to fund education and pensions is kind of like investing in an index fund tracking all humans in a given country.
Only kind of like! Such schemes definitely shouldn't be the primary assets in your portfolio. But it's failure modes a very different from stocks, so some exposure is good.
Also it's usually less than half.
Average tax rate in Denmark is around 45%.
In San Francisco I was paying 38%.
Can you pay education for your kids with 7% of your income? How about healthcare?
What is a social safety net worth?
Including your pension and healthcare, how much of your income is âtaxedâ?
> how much of your income is âtaxedâ?
Generally all income is taxed. I think the personal deductible is around ~10k USD. -- That's not meant to ask, but it's what you asked :)
Taking all taxes deductibles etc. then all in all I think I pay around ~48% of my income in taxes. Note. that lower income means less taxes too.
When I lived in SF it was around 38% (I think). Not that much considering cost of healthcare wasn't covered through taxes in the US.
None of this includes sales tax or VAT, just income.
Thanks for sharing. we have similar programs in Norway and about %35 of my income is taxed.
This only works if you have a reasonable population growth rate. And this isn't happening anymore. So we are boosting population numbers through immigrants that will never afford the kind of housing and retirement the previous generation had. And we are boosting the stocks through printing more money, that also drives real estate prices insane.
That's a recipe for a social conflict. Once the majority can't afford a house and a pension comparable to yours, they won't just stand aside and let you enjoy it. They will label you an oppressor and will come and take it. And the laws won't help you if the majority finds them unfair.
Why do you need population growth rate? You can just have each individual self fund their retirement, no Ponzi shenanigans.
Because otherwise if you graduate at 25, work until 65, and expect to die at 85, your retirement contribution during work years needs to be half of your retirement check. If you are aiming for the same income level, 1/3 of your income needs to go towards retirement.
In reality, people cannot put aside that much, so the % is much lower, relying on higher returns (private) and population growth (public).
> "By letting other people invest in you, you are incentivizing them to promote your own story and do their best to increase your tokens' value."
In 1946, the US Supreme Court established the so-called Howey Test to determine if an investment opportunity is a security offering. These are the Howey criteria:
"Under the Howey Test, a transaction is an investment contract if:
"It is an investment of money;
"There is an expectation of profits from the investment;
"The investment of money is in a common enterprise;
"Any profit comes from the efforts of a promoter or third party."
IANAL, but these personal tokens seem to match every condition of the Howey test. I'd be extremely careful about conducting your own little security offering if you're resident in the US, or allow US residents to participate.
It's worth noting that Alex Masmej, the person mentioned in the article, conducted his token offering while in France.
Mike Merrill has been doing this for a while (kmikeym.com) and didnât seem to run in legal troubles. Heâs in the US of A.
That doesnât mean anything. There were hundreds of ICOs in 2017, and the SEC only sued a handful of them. The rest were not different, they just lucked out of prosecution.
Itâs also worth noting that Alex Masmej, the person mentioned in the article, has commented in this thread.
And every time I see the acronym IANAL I pronounce it as âI, ANALâ.
edit: Why would someone flag this??? Itâs funny!
"Isn't this the same as traditional student debt or, worse, indentured servitude? Not really"
Saying "not really" doesn't make something so. This is, literary indentured servitude. By definition.
Thank you. The indentured servitude character of this stuff is most clear when we look at the $ALEX example. Selling off a chunk of future autonomy and income in order to finance migration to a place with more economic opportunity is exactly what poor folks did circa the 17th and 18th centuries. Perhaps we should look at the history of how that went before replicating it.
My understanding is that economically it was usually a mutually beneficial arrangement, and servants often ended up better off than a normal immigrant. The second-class status of servants is somewhat hard to stomach by modern standards, but honestly it is not much different than the way members of the military are treated (source: I served five years enlisted in the US Navy).
The problem is that you can't separate the economic from the social---even a mutually beneficial transaction can have negative social externalities like undermining the political (and then the economic) power of a whole class of workers or potentially even undermining the individual capacity for independence of the individual involved on a psychological level.
The philosopher Debra Satz's book "Why Some Things Should Not be for Sale" has a great section on bonded labor that captures some of these consequences.
(I think the military isn't a good analogy because the public at large affords military personnel a special kind of respect that counteracts these social externalities.)
Yes, but then you should apply political pressure to better the US army, not go "welp, let's give everybody that experience".
I am not sure why that needs spelling out, but social issues are actually not resolved by making them a suffering contest.
By what definition? In the lambda school case you only pay back if youâre in a job that pays >50k/year, itâs a percentage of income, and itâs capped at 30k. Indentured servitude requires you to do basically anything for your indenture holder for no pay until youâve paid it back. Student loans that cannot be discharged regardless of circumstance sounds far more like indentured servitude than an ISA to me so ânot reallyâ I think is a fair assessment.
Yes. I'm not sure how making the payback variable as a function of salary up to some cap is something unacceptable while a fixed payment obligation is a run of the mill loan.
At least in the version that existed in early America indentured servitude allowed for coercion and there was no bankruptcy option. Whereas in modern law specific performance for personal service contracts are strictly forbidden and bankruptcy is out there.
But student loans are exempt from bankruptcy, so in a way that particular investment in future earnings is a bit outside the modern protections.
The grandparentâs post âthisâ referred to the personal equity proposal, not students loans.
That said:
- I agree that student loans ought to be dischargable in bankruptcy (indeed I think the government should have nothing to do or say with them at all)
- I still donât think they are reasonably referred to as âliterally indentured servitudeâ, though one step closer
We got rid of debtor's prisons too, which is an improvement.
> a person who signs and is bound by indentures to work for another for a specified time especially in return for payment of travel expenses and maintenance.
This != That
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