/z/ - zaibatsu — finance and economics

I'm into some small tech niche and the problem with many of those things is that you have to import the goods from china, which takes a long time. So I just buy a bunch of items, get bulk discount and put them up at a local marketplace with 20-50% profit. People apparently don't mind the premium if they can pick their stuff up in 30 minutes.

I do few odd jobs.My most common jobs are computer repair, body guard work, and computer forensics among other things. I am trying to step away from some of the illegitimate jobs but they pay more and I need that money so I and others do not go homeless.

So this has officially become a cyberbourg space instead of a cyberpunk one.
At least you're honest, Seph.

>>26
What is your solution to bringing yourself out of poverty? Not all of us can sit on the sidewalk and bitch about the free market or larp online and make marxist or post-left soykafposts. Get real, shazbot.

>>26
>doing odd jobs over the internet to make india tier money
>literally defining high tech low life
>bourgeois

This board is probably not for you, since you clearly have no appreciation to freedom, or the power of currency, and I'll even dare to say that you're projecting your Impostor syndrome.

>>32
>>36
>Being so fucking brainwashed that you believe owning a business is the only way people make a living and that this somehow increases "freedom" rather than decreases it.
Hope your businesses grows (and not fold) until you can outsource the labor to south-east Asia and save on investments! Maybe then you can start negotiating at the table of trans-pacific partnership pacts to save even more! Then you can finally be free from being crushed by the big corporations and start crushing the smaller ones whose management are delusional enough to believe one can simply "stay small".

>>44
What are you suggesting then?
How do you put a roof over your head and food on your plate?

And I didn't suggest owning a business, although I don't dismiss the notion, I talked about freelancing and doing soykaf for pennies online at your own pace with no master.

Gentlepeople, please, we all want the same here. I don't think OP's post is as conformist as you make it out to be. It might be a young and edgy post, but it reflects the general state of our affairs
> Money is a necessity in the modern world. You can survive, and maybe even thrive, with no money whatsoever, as a complete outsider to the system, but that will take you effort, and it will land you far from any place where you can actually make a change. This gets us to the next point.

> We all want change. Be it a general feeling of the world being fucked up, or ourselves being fucked up, we want to modify something around us. We want action, but nobody really knows what to do, or where to begin. A natural thing is to ask oneself about the material foundations upon which to base your work. You can have the greatest mind humanity has ever hosted, but you still need means to live comfortably enough to have time to create, or make a living by this creating. Remember! Even Marx had Engels.

> We want to be free, and we don't want to promote ways of life and systems of organization that seem to have outlived themselves, yet we need to help perpetuate them to earn the way of life we want to have.

What is the solution to this? We need to create our own means of production, so to speak, and support the hacker-minded community wherever and however we can. That's what OP meant about business ownership, if i did understand what he meant.

>>22

I like your thread, unfortunately this image-board is full of communists (perhaps going visiting a board called 'zaibatsu' was the wrong choice for them?).

I occasionally freelance as a designer/developer I work full time as a developer. I spend most of my time studying or working harder so that I can eventually pivot into a full time developer or do something sort of security related full time as a freelancer.


Now for my contribution

Something you didn't mention in the OP, a good way to make money is starting some sort of small technology company, the simpler your product is the better. After you've developed the skeleton of a product you can essentially start raising VC. Although this will be especially distasteful for the people on this board if you can register some IP you're bound to make even more $$$. There's a lot more to say about this, but the way that the 'startup' scene is structured these days is absolutely nuts, there's still a ton of money floating around for 'seed funding'. If you do a little bit of research into the current buzzwords and optimize the type of company you create ie: social media influencer inspired machine learning zuckbook dildos for dogs you can make a ton of money on a product that will never need to exist.

Same can be said for a lot of the soykaf on kickstarter, patreon, indygogo etc. Half of these assholes never deliver. If you're sufficiently motivated and you have a lot of grift, 'venture capitalists' and rubes on the aforementioned services are an easy enough way to make money. There's still a ton of money in software.

>pic related
But seriously I love you guys. Lainons before politics to me.

>>46
>What is the solution to this?
The solution is solidarity economics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solidarity_economics) and communization theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communization).
Not further entrenching the system you're constantly coming into conflict with every week of every month of every year of every decade of every century by starting more capitalist businesses.
>freelancing
The problem is as long as this goes on outside of some form of social-economic arrangement you're really not having any impact for the better; so what's the point? You might as well join a co-operative. Thereby wealth, responsibility and authority wouldn't be concentrated at one individual, also helping other like-minded workers (the productive class) by being able to grow the self-employed pool whenever necessary; without introducing exploitative relationships. Of course co-ops by themselves aren't the be-all, end-all; but at least they're a step in the right direction (since it seems it's mainly self-employment/income we're addressing here). Otherwise there are also syndicalist unions for a guaranteed minimum and up income and protection from the boss/management for employees in the standard capitalist enterprises (here's where the majority of the globe's population of workers are stuck by design, because capital needs a discrepancy between employers and employees to be able to maintain a reserve army of labor. Starting your own business also requires large amounts of capital; something which only a few from this strata of society is able to afford in the first place).

>>48
lmao: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc-RM3vxMso

You have to form actual arguments, and clearly and calmly present your opinions if you want to discuss politics. I left the thread up, and nobody got derezzed or warned, but get your soykaf together.

Instead of hijacking this thread why don't y'all start an OP on critique of capitalism and let entrepreneurs and freelancers have their own thread? Thank you.

>>195
> By being able to grow the self-employed pool whenever necessary; without introducing exploitative relationships.

I don't understand how a relationship between individual -> consumer is exploitative whereas a relationship like individual -> co-op -> consumer is not exploitative? How does decentralizing the wealth of the co-op make it any less exploitative for the workers in the co-op surely exploitation via committee is still exploitation?


> Starting your own business also requires large amounts of capital; something which only a few from this strata of society is able to afford in the first place).

I'm sorry could you clarify this as well? did you read the OP? How does camwhoring, OSINT services, design and dev services or exploiting the price diff between alibaba and ebay require a large amount of capital. These are ALL businesses that can be started with an absolutely paltry amount of capital (in all cases < 0 - 2000$ USD) these businesses can also be scaled to pretty incredible levels. To give a personal anecdote, after my first year in college I worked in a factory manufacturing baloney, and while I was there I dreamed up a business that would manufacture tie dye t-shirts at a reasonable price. The next summer I implemented my business with my friend for 200$ total we created a website with word-press and we started to process orders through paypal. We broke even!

To many of the entrepreneurs in these sorts of threads it comes off as extremely condescending when you insinuate that we're all 'exploiters of the proletariat' or that we don't have the 'intelligence' or the 'capital' to start a business. Many business owners are very working class, in my country for instance the great majority of business owners make something like 50k CAD a year. Of course this is all taxed by our pinko govt. that believes it can start a class war by pitting the poor against the slightly less poor.

The final question I have for you, have you ever tried starting a business or a co-op or a 'syndicalist union' or whatever else you want to call it. It's an incredibly liberating feeling working for yourself, even if you're not making a ton of money, and you won't know how easy it is until you try, go on get your dick out on chaturbate.

>>207
>>By being able to grow the self-employed pool whenever necessary; without introducing exploitative relationships.
>I don't understand how a relationship between individual -> consumer is exploitative whereas a relationship like individual -> co-op -> consumer is not exploitative? How does decentralizing the wealth of the co-op make it any less exploitative for the workers in the co-op surely exploitation via committee is still exploitation?
Actually it looks more like
Owner -> business (Owners private property) -> (very likely) workers -> consumers
vs
Workers -> Co-op (Workers collective property) -> consumers

Now in the highly unlikely scenario that one keeps one's business to the employment of one; the singular owner, then that's totally fine. Freelancers also do not exploit anyone, since they work for themselves as well. But what I'm addressing is the OP's broad description. "Small businesses". The fact of the matter is that market forces drive the singular small-business owner to start employing people, if he wants to avoid the ever-looming threat of bankruptcy, because the market dictates that his business has to grow; or die. Especially if he wants to compete on any larger level. Herein the problem arises. The owner is forced to employ workers, as workers need pay the market yet again will dictate that he pays as little as possible to sustain a steady flow of capital gain (so that his business grows); he extracts surplus value from the contribution of the workers that by themselves prop up the functioning of his business to profit and to keep on profiting, until whatever goal the symbolic sum of an infinite number is never reached, or he passes it on to a next of kin, or bankrupts. Therefore:
Workers -> Co-op (Workers collective property) -> consumers
is superior for cyberpunk ends than
Owner -> business (Owners private property) -> (very likely) workers -> consumers
Because the co-operative isn't, as you previously put it "exploitation via committee", because exploitation requires the relation of gain by a party at the expense of another. In a co-operative every single worker is a partial owner of the business, that means there is no singular employer profiting for himself off of the toil of exploited employees. All workers are self-employed and plan the co-op's direction democratically via committee. They all are the committee.
>>Starting your own business also requires large amounts of capital; something which only a few from this strata of society is able to afford in the first place).
>I'm sorry could you clarify this as well? did you read the OP? How does camwhoring, OSINT services, design and dev services or exploiting the price diff between alibaba and ebay require a large amount of capital. These are ALL businesses that can be started with an absolutely paltry amount of capital (in all cases < 0 - 2000$ USD) these businesses can also be scaled to pretty incredible levels.
>Some anecdotes and hyperfellatio of our sacred Entrepreneur archetype who is Jesus incarnate and does no wrong
As my above elaborations pointed to I am well aware that there are periods where these small business are started up by ~an entrepreneur~, but then they enter into the period of grow or die and often chooses to GROW and reach for the stars (to knock off some dated megabusiness from the #1 spot in whatever category one chooses to imagine). The issue here is the process in between the constitution by the privateer of his new business and what the market then demands him to do with this business to actually be able to put as much as a dent in said entrenched monopoly. Monopolies become monopolies for a reason. They're structured like ruthless hierarchies. Amazon was created in the 90s. Facebook in the 00s. They /DISRUPTED/ their competition very effectively. These must be examples to follow then, am I right? Slave labor conditions and user data-mining for profit? That's what brings in great profits. That's how you make a small business with a tweaked idea succeed!

Was reminded of this video, touching reporting on the burgeoning cam industry in China: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dckjk1V-KRM

If you don't want to contribute to the problem then don't copy the structural logic of the problem. When you start off with a hierarchical business in capitalism that's what you're bound to end up with. Replacing the vertical organization with the horizontal you stop mirroring the megacorps wrecking our lives and start physically changing society in another direction.

>>208
I'm not the person you're replying to. Why aren't there more worker cooperatives if they are so good? They sound like they're legal everywhere.
Are you part of a worker cooperative?

Let's say, I opened a store, made some profits, and decided to expand, buy the store next to mine and merge them. And I hired 2 people to work there besides me, but it's actually a worker cooperative. They decide to fire me and share the profits I already made, since they are the cooperatives property, sell the property, and move on. What would I do different to avoid this?

I'm unsure how this post turns out but I don't mean to offend, I am genuinely curious about your position and very open minded to changing my position.

>>210
Not who you're replying to, but I imagine there aren't more cooperatives because most people don't start businesses to reduce exploitation; rather to get $$$s for themselves.
Also, there appears to have been a subtle systematic undermining of cooperatives here in europe since at least the 1980s; in the USA it's maybe been happening since the 1880s.

In your example, since you found the cooperative, you choose its constitution. You could give yourself a permanent veto if you wanted, or some kind of weighted voting system.
Obviously this would be less democratic than the ideal, but it's your decision.
If you start out as a cooperative from the beginning, the company is everyone's shared baby and you should be more comfortable with shared responsibilities.

>>211
>In your example, since you found the cooperative, you choose its constitution. You could give yourself a permanent veto if you wanted, or some kind of weighted voting system.
So I could, for example, make a microsoft sized company, and give every worker a share. Technically, everyone owns the company now (even though myself and the board still own most of it). Is that a workers collective now? I mean you could just save up money and buy a bunch of shares of the company you work, is every public company kind of a workers cooperative if they chose to save a bit of money and invest? How about law firms, they tend to have a partnership model, where after a certain period of employment time and good performance you get some tangible stake in the company, is that a workers collective?

I'm just struggling to imagine any organism I'm familiar with as a pure workers cooperative. I can imagine a "workers" cooperative where your weight in the organism is based on your job, and perhaps the first originators have some permanent stake (as long as they're part of the workers), but this isn't pure.

Another things I don't quite understand how you would deal with, is mob mentality. A corporation is an uncaring, emotionless entity. People aren't. Let's say you have a big store, with 20 workers, and there's a theft from the safe, everyone is getting emotional because that's their money gone, and a rumor spreads that it's one specific worker because they know he has financial trouble, so they just vote to fire him, or treat him so badly that he quits. If the store was private owned, the workers wouldn't give as much of a soykaf.

>there appears to have been a subtle systematic undermining of cooperatives
example please?
Corporations are more focused on growth, that brings the money, puffs out the GDP, so naturally governments are in favor. It makes sense to push this change from the bottom (people) and not the top (gvts), because most individuals are already familiar with a cooperative organism, the family, so the idea should be easy to comprehend.

>>210
I'm the one you were replying to and here's the answer I wrote to that before seeing that the conversation progressed:

>Why aren't there more worker cooperatives if they are so good? They sound like they're legal everywhere.
The cooperative movement has roots within the first wave of the socialist movement. It was challenged by Marxian economics later on (basically consisting of the following critique "co-ops alone can't transcend capitalism"). Therefore they were practiced much more intensely in the 19th century, in the US as well. With the 20th century and Leninist right-wing perversion of Marxist theory, socialists were persuaded by the theory of "just get a vanguard party into political power! Look Lenin got into power and made a "democratic" "socialist" republic - end of argument!" The second hit to co-operative movement was an ideological on levied by the United States during the cold war on it's soil. Anything even remotely socialist would of course be suppressed and that includes knowledge of how to run a business democratically, a practice American workers had previously experimented with prolifically and often times innovatively. Since they were associated with 'red stuff' by the American propaganda doctrine of Macarthyism, they became virtually unheard up until the early 70s, to later take another hit in the 80s and 90s. As a result co-ops are today far more common everywhere else other than USA. the UK, for example, has a lot of co-ops that have stayed active since 19th century and into the current period, having continued on uninterrupted by comparative political suppression. Europe, Latin America and Asia all have big cooperative movements. They're sometimes integrated into the political system, if the political climate has a history of, or is currently consisting of democratic socialists political parties. Marxism-Leninist parties have sometimes suppressed co-operativism, which one can gauge is being due to the Leninists fear of the loss of centralized control, which is one among many indicators that Leninist theory in practice was and is anti-working class and pro-managerial class.

>Let's say, I opened a store, made some profits, and decided to expand, buy the store next to mine and merge them. And I hired 2 people to work there besides me, but it's actually a worker cooperative. They decide to fire me and share the profits I already made?, since they are the cooperatives property, sell the property, and move on. What would I do different to avoid this?
On face-to-face level (2 to 10-90 individuals) consensus democracy is used. When you grow to a size beyond manageable capacity for consensus (usually as you're nearing or around 100 individuals) or beyond a single location: majority rule and ground-up federalism is introduced. Looking something like:
Body of 100, which delegates to body of 10 000, which delegates to 100 0000 -> 100 000 000 -> [you get the drift]
Through this, info from the local reaches the international.

Different schools of thought have ended up with different practical results here. ICA (International Cooperative Association) is one gradualist 'cooperate among cooperatives' approach, the activity of the anarcho-syndicalist trade union CNT/FAI during WWII was a revolutionary approach, Mondragon is a commonly cited contemporary Spanish example of a cooperative enterprise with workers in the hundreds of thousands. Within the Spanish revolution the CNT/FAI included the cooperation of millions of workers whose productive capacity increased that of the previous capitalist period several times over while including the shortening of hours of work-weeks, the need for bosses, landlords, financiers, politicians or other such parasites as they themselves ruled their lives. The experiment ended by becoming isolated by the nazi and fascist powers, a liberal stance of 'non-intervention' and the combined government infiltration by Stalinist and nazi-/fascist-funded nationalists. The Spanish people were to endure a nationalist dictatorship lasting into the third quarter of the 20th century due to the dictatorship being good at playing the "act friendly to to west" game.

Co-operatives, if handled intelligently, are both successful and dangerous.

>>213
>Mondragon
This is very cool

> Within the Spanish revolution the CNT/FAI included the cooperation of millions of workers whose productive capacity increased that of the previous capitalist period several times over
I'd like this to be true but I don't fully trust this, you can just lump it in with the fact that they were at war and everyone knew that if they fucked up they'd get conscripted and die, or to the fact that this is a relatively short testing phase. I can't acknowledge this as being 100% proof but this does hold some value.

I'm basically sold though.

I live rurally enough that there's not much I can get to without a car, which I incidentally don't have, and I'd rather avoid having to rely on family to take me to and from work (gives them too much control over career decisions) so I'd much rather do something online, preferably producing media or software of some sort.

Forming or joining a cooperative has seemed like a good idea to me for a while now: A better deal than working for a non-cooperative business, but with less risk than trying to build my own startup. And especially in software, it seems like relying less on investors who don't care about actually providing something good to customers would reduce the chance of a good project getting shuttered in an acqui-hire (see: https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/ ) or when the owner decides to pivot their business to something more exploitative.

Plus, since it's not relying on a tech bubble to ride on, it's also not going to falter nearly as much when it bursts. Even if you don't want everything to be worker-owned, it stands to reason that having some cooperatives in the economy could help keep it from getting too volatile by acting as a buffer.

Since I'm talking about making software in a team over the internet, it's not like getting a ton of investment capital is really needed to start things either, just people who trust each other and can put in the time into make something. In a lot of other industries, I'd think consumer's cooperatives would make sense: A business that isn't focused on B2B transactions will need to pay back its start-up capital plus interest with what it gets from consumers anyway, and recently the Jumpstart Our Business Startups act allows equitey to get crowdfunded in the United States.

I'm not entirely sure what cooperatives I'd be most able to work at, though. Mostly I've been thinking I ought to practice my programming skill and make a video game or something, though I haven't done so nearly as much as I'd like. Currently planning to at least finish a a very simple game on my own, if only to get a better appreciation for what everyone else does for me on a team. The details of that are more suited for λ or Δ though, so I'll post there when I actually get anything done.

I started by helping a friends company manage their email affordably.

Moving forward I helped them and a few of their friends make websites, moved onto VPN's and SEO since everyone and their mom wants it.

I hate not working with anyone and doing SEO, but like the freedom and feel like i'm progressing.

The best route, in my opinion, to generate money, is by playing on the stock market.
The market of cryptocurrency being my personal choice. Playing with digital and decentralized coins of any state figure rather than a job, I feel it like an ideological statement.

It is my desire to work with Alice on the internet in this field, looking for patterns through bitfinex or cryptopia APIs, operating as a team over the large casserole of boiling cryptocurrencies through the net.

>>242
I like your style Alice, but what are you suggesting? Some sort of arbitrage? TA? social media sentiment analysis? Optimistically abusing small & slow foreign exchanges? I can (and do) bring these things to a prototype/mostly working state.

You could also think about making dosh over the cryptosphere itself, not by actually trading cryptos. Offering streams of aggregated data, predictions, there's probably more stuff my that's the end of my creative capacity for right now.

>>244

Not the poster you are responding to, and it seems this thread died awhile ago, but if this was a thing with momentum I would partake in it. I've been looking to get into forex or stock markets anyway for side cash, and going with a group would help minimize risk

>>354
we just need a hero that can make use of a bunch of soykafty programmers and NEETs to make us all rich

This thread literally died because of "muh anti-capitalism thinking" and "but you're exploring people", literally I can't enter in a normal thread where people talk about stuff that really matters that is themselves and their lifes, how to make sure to have sustainable life and live with freedom and people they like. Like why always this soykaf happens here? All this ancoms and "left reactionary thinkers" saying soykaf that not even in Russia after USRR they believe anymore. Why this is just a normal freelancer and business general thread.

>>433
Caring about what some ranting sperg says is the real problem. Let them comment with their text walls, it makes them feel better about themselves and their ideas.

I am going to keep on doing what I want regardless of their rants.

>>439

You're right bro, I'm caring too much about this spergs with their shiny new ideas of how to solve a problem that is mathematically and physically unsolvable without axiomatic putting stuff that we already have today making their ideas obsolete and doing again the same retarded ideas of central planning.

>>461
I would almost argue that if they were in any way serious about their anti-capitalist ideas they wouldn't be arguing about it on the internet they would be instead creating shell companies and starting their revolutionary tactics. Only problem is that they aren't smart enough to actually engage with the problem and build something real, instead they just get off on arguing about obtuse philosophy, because it makes them feel accomplished for some reason.

If you read texts about revolutionary movements like a great example is the biography of Trotsky written by his wife and Victor Serge. In that text it is very apparently that the russian revolution was ran basically how a modern tech startup is run. The pattern is eerily similar, just being run to optimize for political power rather than capital. You see similar things reading about the libyan or egyptian or singaporean revolutions that occurred from first hand accounts. If these people on here were really serious about anti-capitalist evolution even slightly they would be starting a small business.

>>476
Yeah because the government wouldn't just arrest everyone the second they caught on to their intentions. People can't do anything because you actually don't have the freedom to contend government in any meaningful way, unless you have more money than the government like Apple or you have so many people behind you that the government becomes powerless. The former is unlikely to be achieved by a socialist and the latter relies on socialists being able to promote their ideology more effectively than a highly funded and organised media, run by people who would prefer everyone died in some sort of nuclear race war than give up their right to excess.

People aren't any less serious about Socialism just because they don't go out and get themselves pointlessly arrested, just to prove to you their dedication to the cause.

Imagine actually running a business instead of living off the interest of your capital LOL

>>529
>Yeah because the government wouldn't just arrest everyone the second they caught on to their intentions.
As opposed to what other tactic where that would be less likely? I would think starting or joining a cooperative would be one of the safer things to do. A cooperative is just an organization owned by people who also happen to work at it, and it seems to me like getting the public to accept that as inherently threatening would be pretty hard to do without also undermining the narrative that supports capitalism.

It's not like capitalism's proponents would want to imply that cooperatives are productive and effectual enough to eat up market share until they can simply overtake the economy. And if they point to cooperatives being less hostile towards unions, that just helps to highlight the reasons why unions exist to begin with.

Though also, I don't think being particularly hostile towards people making a non-cooperative businesses in a context like this is really that effective in drawing people toward the cooperative mindset. Staying patient and framing cooperatives as an opportunity to reduce workplace stress while putting more emphasis on craftsmanship and job security than short-term cash grabs seems like it'd be more attractive than making what might be someone's first impression of the concept of cooperatives be "It's that thing you need to do or else the anti-capitalists get mad at you."

>>541
>Though also, I don't think being particularly hostile towards people making a non-cooperative businesses in a context like this is really that effective in drawing people toward the cooperative mindset.

I think the main issue here is that people who are revolutionary have to work and make money, and many don't really care to police themselves in the micro when it comes to their political ideals. If I start a grocery store, and hire 5 employees to stock shelves, and I intend to use massive portion of the proceeds from my grocery store to fund a community bail/legal fund for rioters. Just for example. This grocery store might not be run as a collective, I want to maximize the amount that I can contribute to bail funds and legal funds for our local revolutionaries. The employees of my store are probably mostly normal people, but possibly a comrade or two.

Is it a waste of my time and money to run the store cooperatively with a bunch of normal people who could not possibly care less about the structure of the business? Is it a waste of my time and money to pay those normal people more money than they would make at a different grocers when they are content to work for me at normal market rates?

My point with this example is, it is clearly better to put aside moral concerns in the micro, to focus on the larger ends that actively pertain toward a meaningful revolutionary goal. I've seen situations like this where bored local rabble rousers will literally harass businesses based on minor ethical issues like this, because they have nothing ACTUALLY revolutionary to do with their time. And that is all that is going on in this thread.

>>540
Oy vey

Continuing with the thread's original intended purpose, I believe there are many other things that can be done online, including copywriting, which is just writing for companies that need to persuade potential costumers. There are so many things that can be done nowadays, depending on what little competence you have with certain services or sofware. I personally make banners for small internet businesses, either by comission or selling them in my online store.

>>560
The problem with this is that it often isn't very lucrative. Even expending the time to learn one technology specifically can get you a quick and easy job nearly anytime. Especially if it is a weirder component in the technological stack.

>>575
>The problem with this is that it often isn't very lucrative
It isn't because if it's an easy task, you are competing with all the poor countries in the world (India being the most prevalent in the IT industry).
It's a good route to learn something new or to earn a few bucks while doing it if you don't have something better to invest your time and effort, but in the long run you can''t survive with that sort of work.

I'm very suprised to see that no one is suggesting doing illegal activities, the amount of money you can make by being a l33t haxxor is unimaginably high

>>583
This is the understatement of the year, you are much better off working at McDonalds a few days a week and saving up money while you train for a real job, than spending countless hours doing tasks for below minimum wage. Taskrabbit is actually the only example I've found that is not like this, where you can get minimum wage for doing interesting things.

>>584
Because we aren't stupid. Go away FBI-kun.

This is perhaps not strictly on-topic, but this seems to be the most appropriate thread, even if I'm coming from the opposite side of the problem. Say that I wanted to anonymously and privately hire a local to do a one-off job. The nature of the job wouldn't be strictly illegal but would probably make most people suspicious. In other words, we're talking about a gray market kind of deal. How would I go about doing this? I essentially need a platform that will allow me to hire individuals willing to be paid for ad hoc services without revealing my identity or the nature of the job to the world at large.

>>598

This is actually a currently unsolved space, outside of a certain subset of activities that mostly are online-related or allow for clear delineation. At least if I am interpreting your requirements correctly. Lets say I want someone to do X that I can readily verify, we can automatically toss out the entire 'dead gang' meme entirely because it requires waaaay too much trust to be done in a decentralized way without an authority or arbitration that could enforce judgement. eg. if I give you a package to deliver and you steal it, if we have done our anonymization properly there is no recourse. Even if there was an anonymous arbitration silk road style, if the person who stole soykaf is anonymous, I can't force them to pay unless they had a pre-commitment amount larger than the value of the product. Most people who would be delivering drugs no questions asked, are poor and probably won't be able to lock thousands of dollars in an arbitration process that they may or may not trust. This could be made to work, technically speaking but the incentives for the delivery people to join are so low you would have no takers.

If you are talking about some kind of grey area thing that has a verification element to it. Like say I want to hire someone to tag a local freeway near my house with some artwork, because I the grey concrete is drab and boring. I can offer money, and I can readily verify whether a the tagging happened or not. I can do a form of arbitration if we really wanted on this, but it might be unnecessary. The issue with these sorts of hiring practices is, that you are anonymous, but the person you have just hired effectively is not. They actually have to go someplace and do something to your specifications. Even if that thing can take place in a multitude of different areas, say, you give them the choice to tag any of 5 freeways in town near your house with some choice art. They still have to go someplace and do something in a way, such that you can verify a before and after.

Now, thinking about it that way, you are anonymous but they are not because of this information asymmetry. If you are a cop setting up a dragnet to catch someone tagging in specific areas, you could place an open ad for cities across America and honeypot hundreds of graffiti artists this way. The asymmetry of the information between you two causes an issue for many types of jobs that are structured like this. You have all the cards, and the money, the other person has to give away information, putting them at a disadvantage at every step along the way. They have a disadvantage in the initial offer, the execution of the action, and the payment/arbitration process afterwards. Effectively even if this was designed technically, there would be so little incentive for a person to actually offer their services on the platform.

Hacking and such things work fine and always have, even before btc, because digital goods and digital services, or services sent via the postal system don't create a asymmetry between the buyer and seller. At least not one that can't be fixed with a trivial implementation of 3rd party arbitration. If you want something local and IRL, you have a much better chance of being successful by asking friends. Doing so is easier, and works readily.

>>599
Thank you for your detailed post. It is interesting from a theoretical perspective. However, I must apologize if you were hoping to have a theoretical conversation, as I was asking for practical reasons. If you're still interested in helping me with the practical side of the problem, I will say that I don't require a trustless arrangement. I'm willing to rely on the good will of my would-be employee. What I have in mind is not so dramatic as to make this a problem. That said, it is important that I do not describe the nature of the job much more precisely than I have so far, so I can only help you so much when it comes to giving me advice. You seem like a sharp individual, though, so I will say that I am not opposed to employing any ad hoc solution you may invent, so long as it doesn't conflict with my goals, etc. I will say that the job is physical rather than digital. Having said that, I will also attempt to head off any suspicion by specifying that it is not sexual or sexually charged. It's a straightforward job I need done in meatspace, and, while I'm pretty sure it's completely legal, it would likely draw unwanted scrutiny from law enforcement if the details were made public, so I don't think that just any individual would be willing to do it.

>If you want something local and IRL, you have a much better chance of being successful by asking friends.
I might do that if it weren't for the fact that my friends are tied to me. It is mission critical that I don't reveal my identity along the way.

This might sound like a big LARP, but I will assure you that I am only LARPing a little bit (for my own amusement, of course). I have what I believe are legitimate reasons for wanting things done this way.

>>601
Don't say what it is you are talking about in a concrete way please. But we can talk about this in an abstract way that will be perfectly deniable. Think of any action as though it was a graph problem. So we can chain actions together in graph-node form, but without the mapping that makes them concrete.

"Go to freeway and paint a tag on the side" thus becomes:
Go to place, leave item there, leave place. Verifiable by person who ordered it.

Or you could say things like, go to place, hide object, take object, leave. Go to place watch object, take notes on it leave. Go to place unnoticed, do action, leave unnoticed. All of the above are examples of ways in which you can, in this conversation and hopefully in your future endeavours describe actions purely as a set of discrete graph operations. Rather than showing the map on which those operations operate.

If you word what you are interested in, in this way, then we can discuss it. Please don't say things you don't feel comfortable with in public areas such as this though.

>>602
Hm, I'm not convinced of the utility of this method, but it's essentially "obtain item, go to place, hide item, leave place."

How do you lainons find clients? I'm kind of in a fuck right now and thinking of starting freelance web development, and maybe some linux sysadmin for VPS's and stuff. The only issue i have is how would i go about finding clients that would give me a sustainable wage all year round

I might know various people who would be interested in purchasing a web site.
If Alice wants to post a portfolio, I might be able to find her clients, on my side, I'd take a 10% commission on anybody I refer. I'm pretty busy, so the key word is might, but if anybody's interested I'll look into it.

>>608
Btw this isnt roll play, I'm serious.

>>610

A really easy way to find clients when you are just starting out is to go on various websites and just cold call ask them. Church websites are especially good for this. Most of them were made with MS Frontpage in 2004, and will pay a few thousand to have a new site designed and implemented for them. This is my goto when I am down and out as cold calling them almost always works, and you can usually get a sale within the first 10 you ask.

>>611
I'll probably do that to keep contracts local, easier to make sure i'll get paid and everything