Fast forward to today and you can still come up with an easy list of 20 countries that exhibit human rights abuses on their own people on a day to day basis.

How do you service the debt? You print and print. And then that causes more unrest. You can't default and you can't keep rates high enough for long to matter on inflation. Because you have to print to service the debt which only grows with higher rates and time, which you have less of when unrest grows.

The USD as world reserve currency is the biggest sword the US has.

At current rates or higher we just piss off every country as they trade in eurodollars. They have started the process and will move off USD unless we get back to a favorable rate for their debt loads.

With our debt load, it's either lower rates and continue to print and inflation (traditional and/or more asset bubbles). Or elevate rates and boost our interest expense and suppress the economy while fighting inflation until entities quit buying our debt and we lose significant power. And then, we still need our money printer and more inflation occurs.

As for me, I'm going with keeping recent "elevated" rates so big banks can scoop up smaller ones in short term and inflation has some check, then back to lower rates after election. I'll hold inflation hedging assets indefinitely.

US is screwed financially. Still better than most economies, but still screwed. Unfunded liabilities, AI, wage gap, education and housing costs, populism, political divide, geopolitical battles. There is no thesis that is great for the US unfortunately. It's best pitch is other countries are just as screwed or more.

There is no way out of the debt load. All solutions require printing like crazy. Or defaulting but you cannot give up the world reserve currency and the fallout would be catastrophic.

You can't prevent adolescents from accessing porn. I used to dial-up to playboy.com. Magazines were available too as dad's just left them out. Kids know VPNs nowadays too.

Their idea of having everyone submit government ID to view website content is ridiculous.

You can join the military at 17. But in Texas, I guess you can't look at porn for another year.

And yet the English language is a West Germanic language.

Culture is objectively NOT a vast majority British.

Law - so what. Civil institutions - not really. Country was inspired by Parliament and Magna Carta but devised a better foundation.

The US is nothing like Great Britain. There's vastly more impact from Italians, Irish, Germans, French, Spanish, Mexicans and Blacks in our cities than British. Almost nobody celebrates anything British in any city lol. We celebrate our victory over them and that's it. California and Texas alone are bigger than the entire UK. British descendants are just a blip on the 330M+ population.

Yet you find celebrations and cuisine and other cultures and impact from many other ancestries and heritages. US Infrastructure - Irish and Chinese built railroads. Highway system was derived from the Germans. The British are irrelevant and again, your people back home are just wrong in their understanding.

I'm not playing a word game. You have a very antiquated perspective and I don't think you quite understand America. That's not abnormal. Many you might consider way more American than you don't either.

I understand what you are saying though. I truly do. I just think it's a non-productive perspective for this country. What point does it serve to alienate and put people in a box?

I have Muslim employees. They don't partake in things that others do. It's ok. I know Bangladeshi & Indian men share a bunch of values and perspectives with southern US men over northerners in general too. They also share values with regard to hierarchy/age/position with many New Yorkers and Chicagoans.

No American citizen needs to feel so insecure because they might have different values or don't share a certain culture. People that have never left America don't share the same cultures or values either (north vs south, right vs left). We have distinct regional cultures and we have anomalies even within states (Miami, Vegas, Austin, Chicago).

Your original statement "If my ancestors had shaped the America that exists today it would look very different!"

That's the point of America. At some point there were Blacks, Mexicans, Irish and Italians that felt like that.

Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. And a general belief in exceptionalism is a tradition.

E pluribus enum - out of many, one. That's what happened. And what will continue to happen. Your British narrative is just false.

My grandfather was an American of German ancestry and served in the 95th infantry fighting in Europe in WW2. He's just as American as the wagon trail people. And Arnold Schwarzenegger is just as American as both of them too.

Your home county is just completely wrong in their understanding.

Top 3 Ancestry groups (2015 Census) are actually 1) German, 2) Black/African-American and 3) Mexican. English comes in #5. [1]

If you tally English/Scottish/Welsh, you are only talking about 10% of the US population is British descent. And that was from the Census in 2015. In 2020 they had a White category which was #1, and only 8.2M identified explicitly as English and 1.75M as Welsh.

> if you relocated the population of say Bangladesh to the US, and gave everyone US citizenship, they wouldn’t suddenly become “American.”

They would. You don't have to adhere to some sort of defined American culture or fully assimilate into it, it's not Denmark. If you travel to NYC, Miami, Atlanta, New Orleans, Iowa, LA, San Fran, Dallas, Seattle, you are going to get different people and experiences and cultures. I can assure you they are all very much Americans.

I'd argue that those that worry about a scale of Americanism and where they'd place their own fellow citizens are actually the least American if anything. We can call it the American Culture Paradox. Those that think they are the most American and categorize or judge others are actually the least American!

> The American founders clearly recognized as much when they created a distinction between native-born citizens and naturalized citizens and wrote it into the Constitution.

Yes because they had such massive distrust for the monarchy they didn't want outsiders infiltrating and taking over their new government and country.

[1] https://www.infoplease.com/us/race/ancestry-us-population-ra... (2015 Results)

This is not the case and is actually impossible. Impossible they will maintain them or higher. And impossible we would recover.

The US is headed towards $1T in interest payments alone annually.

$34T in national debt AND $213T in unfunded liabilities. 2/3 of the budget is non-discretionary

The longer they stay elevated the more the average interest rate on debt goes up. For the US and the world since it's the reserve currency. This pisses everyone off.

Rates will go back down to around 2% because the US AND the world cannot sustain an expensive dollar. There's 65T in eurodollar debt (US dollar denominated debt) globally. [1] I've seen higher estimates too.

"Approximately half of all cross-border loans, international debt securities, and trade invoices are denominated in U.S. dollars, while roughly 40 percent of SWIFT messages and 60 percent of global foreign exchange reserves are in dollars." [2]

We aren't going to end up back around 2% because the Fed wants to. It's because we have to. You cannot maintain the world reserve currency at these rates after everyone got drunk off the lower rates for decades. And you cannot have the debt load we have and maintain these rates or higher. There's no easy way out of a debt spiral.

Just my opinion but rates will go lower. Printing will go into hyperdrive. Inflation will rip. There will be more unrest. Personally, I'm holding inflation-hedging assets.

[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/01/65-trillion-debt-bank...

[2] https://libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2022/07/the-u-...

Anyway, I refuted ALL of your points and even supplied angles for keeping costs down while driving value to defined audiences.

I personally scraped and ML'd all AirBnB listings and calendar data every day for over a year to build a product. It didn't cost that much in time and $. Got a shit ton of value out of it. Someone even built a nice business doing exactly what I was doing.

If you look on the other thread for the OP, someone had done 100m products for $550/mo. You also must not understand that shopify and woocommerce have structured data available because you are talking about people being needed to keep product data up to date. They aren't scraping the frontend.

Personally I'm a riches in niches guy and a more defined audience and product set would be the way to go off of what they've started.

The ocean doesn't need to be boiled to provide value to consumers and to merchants here.

Every single entity that sells online is trying to boost their revenue share for direct to consumer as a mandate. Because they get more margin and they get to know their customer for ongoing marketing. The pandemic exposed many product manufacturers and brands that had such a high % in brick and mortar partners. They frantically tossed inventory onto Amazon. The only problems with that are

1) amazon tax on sales and

2) they don't get to know their customers.

Indeed aggregated job postings until it had traffic and then it became the place to post jobs.

Google was nothing against other providers until it did better search. And then they got traffic and built a solid ad product that providing bidding on effective cpc not highest bid like competitors were doing. They rewarded better peforming ads and rewarded themselves ($$$) at the same time and the rest is history.

Your thesis is not accurate. This can work. Typically though, these things require a lot of capital until they make real money. Tech costs and then marketing which is really education can be expensive.

Most users originate ecomm searches from Amazon (60%) [1]. Next highest is Google

If the search works really well though, word of mouth can be everything.

I'd probably focus on the audience that has income and would prefer to buy direct from merchants and not search and buy from Amazon which can be painful (too much crap, fakes, bad reviews, doesn't always have high end products, not always cheaper, etc). Maybe even focus on higher priced items first ($250 or $500 and up). They'll likely have better content associated with them, there's typically more margin, and there are a lot of high end products not sold on Amazon, only direct.

Hacker news has a good launch audience for this. Also probably Etsy buyers and merchants.

Not that you would be interested in this - but ecomm search for influencer sponsored products would probably do very well as a niche product. About 11% of searches originate on TikTok. Younger people are into who is hawking what for some reason lol. You could even rank most popular sponsored posts for the celebs too as a leaderboard for the biggest shills haha.

[1] https://www.insiderintelligence.com/content/online-shoppers-...

The context of the entire discussion was NOT for the parent to decide to apply for jobs or become a prisoner of war.

It was to work for the man or do a startup. And building a successful startup is fucking hard.

Furthermore, nobody in SV is using the definition that the parent is irate about when they say building a startup is hard. They're using the one I've outlined.

Also it's a completely different ballgame when you build a company that has employees versus an app.

We don't know what path the parent was talking about or what their business would be. We don't know their financial position.

Regardless, it's hard to build a successful business. Especially on your first attempt.

You listed one career choice and agriculture is actually the easiest industry. #2 lowest failure rate in 1 year, #1 lowest after 5 and after 10 years [1]. What you thought was fucking hard is objectively not compared to every other industry from BLS data. Although I'd still say it's a startup and is thus fucking hard personally.

Starting a company is very easy. Building a successful and sustainable one is fucking hard.

I've built a few successful companies but did it while having income (both active and passive). I recommend the same for anyone's first endeavor. I also recommend having a partner or two and maybe ONLY go solo after you've built a successful business. It's not glamorous being a startup CEO and can be very lonely without partners.

50% of businesses fail by year 5

And 80% of small businesses have no employees. Most of the 50% that survive to year 5 are just paying bills and aren't self-sustaining businesses that have enterprise value and can be sold.

If you want to be a one person show, yeah that's not hard in a service business. If you are average, 50% shot to make it 5 years.

If we're talking about building something that kicks off actual profit and has employees, and outperforms the opportunity cost of working for someone else or taking an equity stake in existing business, it is most certainly fucking hard.

To the parent - if you have savings and get a partner or two - I say keep applying but go for the startup too. The best businesses in my opinion are ones that make money closer to day 1 than year X. Figure that path out. Riches in niches. Don't worry about the macro environment.

[1] https://www.lendingtree.com/business/small/failure-rate/