If you think 100 million dollar houses are egregious, you could try to make building them illegal. But then they'll just buy one in another country, or a yacht, or something similar.

A lot of this is why capitalism works.

Smoking forces you to find open air spaces, is relaxing and induces slow breathing. In some ways it's a form of meditation. Other times it forces social spaces with other smokers in which you have to ask for a ligher and you have a conversation starter.

A nice practice with a terrible health outcome.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24892933

Points: 10

# Comments: 2

Productivity equals production.

A small team of engineers who design and create a machine to build brick walls en masse, could have the same productivity as hundreds of thousands of bricklayers working 16 hours a day.

A good example of this are Silicon valley, Singapore or New York, which are small social groups that have more economic and social output than most countries with a much larger population.

To be more productive and have a richer and better quality of life (richer is not necessarily more quality of life), it's generally more efficient and sustainable to have better education and social conditions for workers, than to exploit them.

I would think it's also logical that serial killers tend to focus on women and children because they are generally easier to overpower than another male. There is probably also a sexual component to killing and I would guess that most serial killers tend to be heterosexual, hence why they mostly target women.

For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_serial_killers_by_numb...

I would also add that the city and location probably influence the economics and profitability of it a lot.

1. Get your foot in the door with a small deal. Try and close a small deal, sell them a pilot, a three month trial or sell a small component and then grow your way in. Closing a large deal from the start is close to impossible.

2. When you have an entry point, get several members of the management team on board. As BostonEnginerd mentions, demo and network to everyone you can and try and get them on board. Executives at large established CO's tend to be risk averse even if they have decision making power, so they will try to shield their decisions as part of a team evaluation result.

3. Be prepared for a very long sales cycle. Some of the best deals will take really, really long to close. Work on as many leads as possible so you don't get demoralized if one doesn't come out and keep emailing them even if you haven't heard from them in six months.

4. Be persistent. Even if they desperately need your product, sometimes large CO's are so bogged down in bureaucracy and day to day operations that it will take them a long time to fit you in their agendas.

5. Large CO's suffer from severe FOMO. Use this to your advantage, show them a competitor who is doing something similar. Even if it's a test 8 time zones away, this will definitely shake them up.

As for your product. A successful early warning system for disease should be easy to sell to a large health insurance company which could potentially save millions or billions from preventing insurance claims. It could also be possible to sell it to an established software vendor in the health care industry.

But generally the high amount of leverage implies aggressive cost cutting, which negatively impacts the employees and in some cases R&D, which in turn means risking the future sustainability of the company for short term profits.

If you're interested in the topic, "Barbarians at the Gate" is a great book to understand the in and outs of LBO's. The writing style also makes it fun to read.

I don't think it has disincentivated anybody from becoming less wealthy and/or working less. It just incentivizes tax evasion, but even that is not significant.

On the other hand, a large number of social programs have been built around this new tax. Anybody in the country could get cancer and would get free decent healthcare.