Hubbert's comments

And since this is YCombinator: it means high wages for YOUR CUSTOMERS to afford YOUR PRODUCT by the MILLIONS.

There are only so many Senators and Hedge Fund managers, and they spend their weekends in The Hamptons, not playing with your crappy iPhone game.

We all need income to SURVIVE, and indeed FORCED to take the market wage for our labor. The question is whether the market wage will tend toward "Modern Western Wage" or "Communist Slave Wage." Current trade and industrial policies favor the latter.

We are currently losing this non-war. The Chinese are playing to win this non-war.

Uh, no. Aside from petroleum issues, it was a SUSTAINABLE CLOSED SYSTEM of trade among similarly-developed countries with similar standards. This could continue even if innovation had suddenly stopped in 1985.

Far more sustainable than the present, which involves unsustainable personal debts, unsustainable trade deficits, and unsustainable federal borrowing.

But please note that CENTRAL POINT OF THE ARTICLE explains WHY our technological superiority lessened, rather than moving exponentially further ahead.

* cheap products for consumers = higher standard of living. IIRC, consumer products are about 18% of a typical household budget. Housing, healthcare, and education are the majority.

For the millions now with ZERO income, even Chinese-made Wal*Mart crap is unaffordable. Yet the unionized workers of the 1950s - 1970's somehow purchased cars, household products, and clothing like domestically-made Levis blue jeans WITHOUT slave labor from repressive countries and without borrowing trillions fro those same countries.

I will gladly trade somewhat higher consumer prices for confidence that I will be employable in safe conditions at a middle-class wage for the duration of my normal working life.

And I'm very pro-manufacturing: but the environmental externalities must be mitigated and properly priced: my health is very valuable to me, even if there's no clear market price for it.

"High labor prices" = "High wages." THIS MEANS YOU!

Unless you are worth >$10M, are retired, or live off a trust fund, admit that you're labor not capital: just like highly paid executives, surgeons, and name-brand attorneys are more "labor:" they generate more earned income than asset income.

Go ahead: pull out your 2009 tax return: is the "income from wages, tips, and salaries" greater than the "interest income" and appreciation on your house (ha ha!)? Then you care about WAGES. Stop pretending like you're a Rockefeller: you're not. And your doctor / lawyer / professors / boss aren't either.

(If you persist in an unjustified obsession with your assets, HIGHER WAGES are what will drive housing prices up in the long run...compare incomes and housing prices in Palo Alto and Lubbock, TX, and HIGHER WAGES and GROWING MANUFACTURING will help your stock portfolio: do you really want to see GE and Boeing follow GM into bankruptcy?)

Aaronontheweb, why wait for government action? Come work at my apartment TOMORROW 16 hours/day for $0.20/hr. I'll try to find a way for you to inhale some heavy metals and asbestos while you work. Imagine the fun of trying to predict whether you will be functionally retarded or die of painful cancer first. Either way, you will die painfully, because I do NOT provide health insurance.

Seriously: How did we get from "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" to "drive down everyone's quality life to match the world's most miserable and backward countries?"

Aside from technology that hadn't been invented yet, people in the West lived did very well in the late 20th century. Most people who bothered to show up for work had a balanced diet, adequate medical care, and usually a car. And they somehow managed to do it without rampant workplace death, child labor, or rendering the ecosystem uninhabitable for decades[1]. They even had fundamental civil rights like freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press.

[1] Aside from notable exceptions like Love Canal, etc. But I see that as largely the result of ignorance; we now have a better understanding of the impacts of our behavior on the place we LIVE.

No comment on whether the $1M AUD goal is reasonable (other than you have to start where YOU are and don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good). But, since you mentioned your age and other posters are also commenting on it:

1. Ignore those who say "don't be so serious at 20." You're VERY WISE to consider the path that you're on: you're not going to magically become experienced when you reach a certain age, and it's a competitive job market, and brutally so for the younger and less experienced. You're facing the classic dilemma of how to get enough experience to be employable...one which I'm also struggling with and I'm older than you. I wonder if some of the "superstars" in your program had parents or older siblings who were in software, to provide them with "tribal knowledge" and connections.

Anyway, it's your life, and I commend you for examining its direction so that you can do something about it.

2. Consider reading "Seasons of a Man's Life" by Levinson. It starts very slowly, and is somewhat dated (life today is a little more flexible and fluid, but not that much), but it's an interesting guide to the different stages of adult life. Again, if you're like me, you had some idea of what was expected of you in childhood and teens (Prepare For University!), but not so much after that. It turns out that for most of us, life is both richer and less predictable than "secondary school, university, job, marriage, gold watch retirement, death."

Better article from Failure Magazine: http://failuremag.com/index.php/feature/article/cool_custome...

Newspapers' role in cheering on, validating, and accelerating the Trillion Dollar Housing Bubble helped seal their death warrant. In addition (especially in this case), many "reporters" functioned merely as stenographers for interested parties ("Home prices remain fundamentally strong, according to the National Association of Realtors).

It was especially obvious when I found well-informed Web sites blogs that would intelligently dissect and contradict the bad "reporting" on the subject.

The spirit of volunteerism and innovation that you admire is impractical when managers define the employee's primary responsibilities in a way that requires unpaid overtime every week.

Security prices have two basic outcomes: "up" and "down." Usually they fluctuate, so almost any call will "eventually" be proven correct. Sporting events are also mostly binary outcomes, so "the Cubs will reach the World Series" will probably be right if given 200 years.

But with technology predictions, there's an almost infinite set of outcomes, so being right in direction but not timing is significant. For instance, someone who says "Little Rock, Arkansas will win the Super Bowl within 5 years" will look pretty smart even if it takes 6 years for Little Rock to (very unexpectedly) get an NFL franchise and 9 years to reach the Super Bowl.

Granted, technology predictors can use also use some tricks to narrow the possibility space in their favor.