Remember how funding used to work before vulture capitalists cornered the market of funding start-ups?
Sirius Systems Technology was a personal computer manufacturer in Scotts Valley, California. It was founded in 1980 by Chuck Peddle and Chris Fish, formerly of MOS Technology and capitalized by Walter Kidde Inc.
Since 1980s, and accelerating after the dot-com boom, two parallel processes took place, first predominantly in North America, but more recently, diffusing throughout the world:
The result has been a shift away from being able to fund tech start-ups from middle-class savings and/or old-school bank credit to funding nowadays primarily coming from people inside the Perpetual Sillionaire Class, or directly in that class's service. And one of the entirely obvious side effects of that shift is, when it comes to attaining funding, licking sillionaires' boots is a more important skill than inventing something that would be broadly useful. When tech journalists tell of strange start-ups like Juicero, they gleefully tell how absurd the projects were, but they often neglect to gaze into the boot-licking and arse-kissing process that got it funded.
@riley This is part of the process I call "the financial event-horizon": wealth disappears into an ever-increasing well from which nothing may ever be recovered.
(There is slow quantum-evaporation due to bad loans / bankruptcies, but this is orders of magnitude less than the accretion-rate -- even during bubble-pops.)
@woozle Yep. Note how conspicuously most politicians are tacitly suggesting that only parts of newly generated wealth are subject to redistribution, but neither the parts that are destined to pass the sillionaires' event horizons, nor the parts that are already beyond them.
