| Ya I've come to the same conclusion. I realized after posting this that there are really two concepts here: 1) earning a benefactor and 2) my life lessons, which for the most part nobody cares about. So this topic is dead in the water for now, but I may try again if I find some new angle on it. Just a little more background for anyone still reading this: I was trying to pay off my debt for 3 years at $1000/month at my last job, and finally realized that it couldn't be done and that the rat race was destroying any chance I had at doing something relevant, which is why I quit. It turns out that bootstrapping with my repair biz actually provides enough income to live on at the proverbial 4 hours per week than all of my previous jobs provided at 40 hours per week, because of self employment leverage. Instead of earning $15-20 per hour in wages for the $100/hr that the business charges, I can just keep the whole $100. Without that leverage, there is little to no hope of getting ahead as an entrepreneur IMHO. So right now I am working on some apps to steadily replace my repair income so I can transition to a sustainable income from software, and then I will settle my debts as a four year consolidation or whatever. What frustrates me most is the timescales involved in this: 12 years in the school of hard knocks after the 16 years of mainstream school, and now another 4 or 5 years to pay for the mistakes I've made. I have the potential to make world-changing concepts like facebook, but odds are, I'll spend half my life just working as hard as I can to break even, and I see this pattern repeated over and over in our society. Something is fundamentally broken, I think we can all sense that, but I'm not sure I can simply blame rich people who don't do anything cool anymore, because many of them realize that capital is so difficult to obtain that it can't be given away lightly. Your final sentence is true, where "close to zero capital outlay" is in terms of technology cost, but that's overshadowed by time and cost of living. The general public overvalues security so I think it's important for hackers to shut that out to some degree, and find a way to be left alone and do their thing, because the reward/risk ratio of making something epic is so high that it outweighs the risk of austerity. |