Most current founders now go to VCs rather than an have employee owned model because VCs wouldn't be happy with employees owning the size of the pie. The changes they would want aren't in line with their goals.
VCs would want founders to restructure the company and would not invest for future rounds for Series A, B, C, etc, (unlikely to happen since employees own the company) or tell founders to dilute employee owned shares for funding (also unlikely), employees would rather make more self-fund the company with profits than go to VCs for funding.
What you say makes sense for the kind of business that wants to scale quickly to try and build a moat and dominate a given market (that is, before it frequently goes downhill once the investors and founders have exited and the cheap money ends).
On the other hand, it doesn't seem like the best move for some product that solves a very specific problem for a very specific group of clients. Why would such a product necessarily even need multiple rounds of funding to be profitable?
I found this guy's take on the AI safety scene to be quite insightful.
In summary, he feels the focus on sci-fi type existential risk to be a deliberate distraction from the AI industry's current and real legal and ethical harms: e.g. scraping copyrighted content for training without paying or attributing creators, not protecting those affected by the misuse of tools to create deepfake porn, the crashes and deaths attributed to Tesla's self-driving mode, AI resume screening bots messing up etc.
It's possible for current harms and future risks to both be real. It's also possible for human civilization to address more than one problem at a time. "You care about X but that's just a distraction from the thing I care about which is Y" is not really a good argument. I could just as well say that copyright concerns are just a distraction from the risk that AI could kill us all.
And it seems to me that if the AI industry wanted to distract us from harms, they would give us optimistic scenarios. "Sure these are problems but it will be worth it because AI will give us utopia." That would be an argument for pushing forward with AI.
Instead we're getting "oh, you may think we have problems now but that's nothing, a few years from now it's going to kill us all." Um, ok, I guess full steam ahead then? If this is a marketing campaign, it's the worst one in history.
The industry does not distract from harm to shake the followers off the tail. Whoever comes next will have to bear huge costs getting over the insane regulatory requirements. The more politicians are involved in the process, the more secure are initial investments.
People are very good at promising a better future in a non-specific way and without much evidence. That's kinda how Brexit happened.
It's when you get the specific details of a utopia that you upset people — for example, every time I see anti-aging discussed here, there's a bunch of people for whom that is a horror story. I can't imagine being them, and they can't imagine being me.
I would say that car crashes are bad, even though they already happen and the motivation behind AI is to reduce them by being less bad than a human.
I think it is a mistake to trust 1st party statistics on the quality of the AI, the lack of licence for level 5 suggests the US government is unsatisfied with the quality as well, but in principle this should be a benefit. When it actually works.
Copyright is an appalling mess, has been my whole life. But no, the economic threat to small copyright holders, individual artists and musicians, is already present by virtue of a globalised economy massively increasing competition combined with the fact the resulting artefacts can be trivially reproduced. What AI does here needs consideration, but I have yet to be convinced by an argument that what it does in this case is bad.
All these things will likely see a return to/increase in patronage, at least for those arts where the point is to show off your wealth/taste; the alternative being where people just want nice stuff, for which mass production has led to the same argument since Jaquard was finding his looms smashed by artisans who feared for their income.
I expected to read that and find Holiday to be some kind of terrible human but I came out of it with an appreciation of what he was doing, despite the author’s clear intent to paint him in a bad light.
Finally. For many years, Lisbon and Porto have been rendered totally unaffordable for average local residents by rampant Airbnb fuelled property speculation and general overtourism.
And all of this under a supposedly left-wing government.
"But many of the structural pressures that sociologists have long identified shape commercial and state sourced news stories just don't apply to independent journalists, who don't have to rely on continued access state contacts, commercial paychecks, don't have to serve ad revenue and corporate PR aims"
I was with you up until this point. Audience capture and the need to sell ads for brain pills etc. are a huge issue for many independent content creators: at least, the ones who are trying to make it their main source of income.
Audience capture is probably the biggest driving point behind media bias, whether the media is commercial or independent. Walter Lippmann put it wall 100 years ago [1]:
> A newspaper which angers those whom it pays best to reach through advertisements is a bad medium for an advertiser. And since no one ever claimed that advertising was philanthropy, advertisers buy space in those publications which are fairly certain to reach their future customers. One need not spend much time worrying about the unreported scandals of the dry-goods merchants. They represent nothing really significant, and incidents of this sort are less common than many critics of the press suppose. The real problem is that the readers of a newspaper, unaccustomed to paying the cost of newsgathering, can be capitalized only by turning them into circulation that can be sold to manufacturers and merchants. And those whom it is most important to capitalize are those who have the most money to spend. Such a press is bound to respect the point of view of the buying public. It is for this buying public that newspapers are edited and published, for without that support the newspaper cannot live. A newspaper can flout an advertiser, it can attack a powerful banking or traction interest, but if it alienates the buying public, it loses the one indispensable asset of its existence.
I'm not trying to dispute or detract from this point, but I'd also like to add that there is also a simple motivation behind media bias that can't be ignored: people wanting to shape public opinion to their own worldview - be they journalists or people who own the presses.
> There is a very small body of exact knowledge, which it requires no outstanding ability or training to deal with. The rest is in the journalist's own discretion. Once he departs from the region where it is definitely recorded at the County Clerk's office that John Smith has gone into bankruptcy, all fixed standards disappear. The story of why John Smith failed, his human frailties, the analysis of the economic conditions on which he was shipwrecked, all of this can be told in a hundred different ways. There is no discipline in applied psychology, as there is a discipline in medicine, engineering, or even law, which has authority to direct the journalist's mind when he passes from the news to the vague realm of truth. There are no canons to direct his own mind, and no canons that coerce the reader's judgment or the publisher's. His version of the truth is only his version. How can he demonstrate the truth as he sees it? He cannot demonstrate it, any more than Mr. Sinclair Lewis can demonstrate that he has told the whole truth about Main Street. And the more he understands his own weaknesses, the more ready he is to admit that where there is no objective test, his own opinion is in some vital measure constructed out of his own stereotypes, according to his own code, and by the urgency of his own interest. He knows that he is seeing the world through subjective lenses. He cannot deny that he too is, as Shelley remarked, a dome of many-colored glass which stains the white radiance of eternity.
I recommend giving the book a read at some point if you have the chance (there's also a free audio book up on YouTube). It's a very thought provoking journey through how public opinion gets formed, and the myriad of different elements at play shaping them.
I'd go even further and say the the motivation isn't specifically to shape public opinion to your view, but simply to present the content in a way that doesn't create cognitive dissonance with your personal view. If you personally don't believe that a piece of information is relevant, then you leave it out. That piece might not be relevant to your own view of the subject, but could be crucial to an opposing view.
I wonder how much of the advertising market is what drove the strong, pre-WWII, anti-communist push. Prior to the holodomor even authoritarian statist communism hadn't been responsible for anything on the order of what capitalism had done.
Some support: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Red_Scare#Seattle_Genera... "Even before the strike began, the press begged the unions to reconsider. In part they were frightened by some of labor's rhetoric, like the labor newspaper editorial that proclaimed: "We are undertaking the most tremendous move ever made by labor in this country ... We are starting on a road that leads – NO ONE KNOWS WHERE!"[6] Daily newspapers saw the general strike as a foreign import: "This is America – not Russia," one said when denouncing the general strike.[7] The non-striking part of Seattle's population imagined the worst and stocked up on food. Hardware stores sold their stock of guns.[8] "
He actually has a fairly interesting segment on the reporting of strikes:
> The underlying trouble appears in the news through certain easily recognizable symptoms, a demand, a strike, disorder. From the point of view of the worker, or of the disinterested seeker of justice, the demand, the strike, and the disorder, are merely incidents in a process that for them is richly complicated. But since all the immediate realities lie outside the direct experience both of the reporter, and of the special public by which most newspapers are supported, they have normally to wait for a signal in the shape of an overt act. When that signal comes, say through a walkout of the men or a summons for the police, it calls into play the stereotypes people have about strikes and disorders. The unseen struggle has none of its own flavor. It is noted abstractly, and that abstraction is then animated by the immediate experience of the reader and reporter. Obviously this is a very different experience from that which the strikers have. They feel, let us say, the temper of the foreman, the nerve-racking monotony of the machine, the depressingly bad air, the drudgery of their wives, the stunting of their children, the dinginess of their tenements. The slogans of the strike are invested with these feelings. But the reporter and reader see at first only a strike and some catchwords. They invest these with their feelings. Their feelings may be that their jobs are insecure because the strikers are stopping goods they need in their work, that there will be shortage and higher prices, that it is all devilishly inconvenient. These, too, are realities. And when they give color to the abstract news that a strike has been called, it is in the nature of things that the workers are at a disadvantage. It is in the nature, that is to say, of the existing system of industrial relations that news arising from grievances or hopes by workers should almost invariably be uncovered by an overt attack on production.
It brings in contrast the public response to workplace shootings, or even the rarer instances when the entire staff of a workplace quit at once.
We quickly found out about a bunch of the nuance of the Half Moon Bay shootings, and appear to be doing things to make those workplaces and living places better (though of course this doesn't help the larger problem of agricultural labor practices). And I think most readers get a vicarious sense of justice out of mass quitings. But yeah strikes, and unionization in general, make bystanders nervous.
There's quite a few independent UK journalists who are refugees from editors that started spiking their stories. Jonathan Cook and John Pilger both had to leave The Guardian.
Big law (at least outside of the US, in the UK/EU) is very much pyramid shaped. Typically the model is based on getting the maximum number of chargeable hours from the minimum number of associates, for a dim prospect of eventually making partner. The overwhelming majority of profits flow to partners at the top of the equity structure.
Libertarians of that stripe are essentially pro plutocracy, which would end up being massively anti liberty in practice.
But just as the winners write the history books, the richest libertarians like Thiel and Koch seem able to define what the ideology looks like in the popular imagination, because they can afford to shape the debate via think tanks, media ownership, campus outreach, lobbying, etc.
