[otakucode]

It always amazes me when a future where everyone can make a good living, but where there may be reduced opportunities for insanely extravagant wealth concentration, makes people scoff, but I see it often. Since technology has solved the problem of distribution - the main product that companies were invented to solve - it only seems natural for centralized companies to dissolve entirely. Aside from solving distribution (both of work and of product), everything companies provide can be provided for nearly no cost by software. And companies today have tremendous overhead, doing unwise things like maintaining offices. They do nothing but drain resources and subtract value. Physical co-location of workers is worthless thanks to technology in most every industry.

And it always seems to be the people who are most dedicated to economic ideals and capitalism who refuse to see that capitalism dictates that the current system of megacorps will be defeated by capitalism itself because they are radically inefficient when compared to swarms of freelancers coordinated by and through software. Simply because we may never see another 'Goldman Sachs' strangling the wealth out of millions and putting it into the pockets of a handful who did nothing to earn it, they ignore the fact that most people only need $72k/yr to get to a point where more money won't even make them happier.

[humanrebar]

> everything companies provide can be provided for nearly no cost by software

Good software is more expensive than you seem to think.

> [megacorps] are radically inefficient when compared to swarms of freelancers coordinated by and through software

That may be true. Or not. It's a big assertion. Lots of projects are more efficient if they have a stable set of maintainers. Could you swap out Linus and his lieutenants in favor of swarms of freelancers and still produce quality Linux kernels? I doubt it.

This whole line of thought (why firms and not markets?) is a branch of economics. If you haven't, read up on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_firm.

"According to Ronald Coase, people begin to organise their production in firms when the transaction cost of coordinating production through the market exchange, given imperfect information, is greater than within the firm."

That seems plausible to me. If we're truly interested in deprecating megacorps, we should reduce transaction costs for laypeople, including by making rules, regulations, and laws easier to grok if they are needed at all.

[mahyarm]

Tell that to software companies that love having everyone in the same place in the same office if possible. Like Google.

If a company is going to have remote workers, they need a culture of supporting remote workers, and they need to be writing things down a lot more, which does have it's own overhead compared to talking to someone beside you.

As peoplesoft said, when you add more programmers to a project, you increase communication overhead. Working in the same office probably has something to do with that overhead.

Also you want to make more than $72k/yr (which is about $120-150k pre-tax btw) on a savings and investment aspect. And to fund projects that matter to you.

[melling]

That's less than a first year salary for a first year junior banker.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-08-20/goldman-sachs-said-...

People with kids need to pay $1000/month for day care in the NYC area. The price for an average 3 bedroom home that's commutable to NYC has to be over $500,000.

Yes, $72k/year will go a long way in Alaska.

[mbrameld]

I think you underestimate the cost of living in Alaska. I live in Juneau and it is very expensive. Maybe not NYC or SF expensive, but in 2012 the median value of a single family home was $332,000. Food and gas are also very expensive. Things might be slightly cheaper in Anchorage or Fairbanks. You might be able to find some cheap land somewhere undesirable and build a house or a cabin, but it's going to be very expensive to get building materials shipped there.

[hudibras]

Median household income in Alaska is $61,000/year, so there are definitely lots of Alaskans who can scrimp by on $72k.

https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/statemedian/

[monknomo]

$72k/year is above average in Alaska; it is above average in every state. If you look at the census data you cite, you can see that Alaska is #7 in terms of median household in the US. I doubt that means that Alaskans are significantly richer than average Americans, it probably means that Alaska is more expensive.

It looks like melling is using Alaska as an example of a cheap place; somewhere your dollar goes farther. If you look at the "Real Value of $100" maps you see floating around[0] you'll see it is not a particularly cheap state. It might be cheaper than New York City, but I'm not at all sure it's cheaper than New York State. In fact, New York looks like it has a median income of 53k, so plenty of New Yorkers scrimp by on $72k. Based purely on maximizing the difference between their income and their neighbors, the hypothetical indie dev should go to Mississippi.

I think looking at the cost of living in a state is a better guide than median income. This cost of living chart[2] says that the cheapest states are Mississippi, Tennessee, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Indiana, whereas the most expensive states are Hawaii, DC, New York, Alaska (ha!), and New Jersey. Based purely on minimizing their cost of living, the hypothetical indie dev should still go to Mississippi.

I am a little surprised to see that the median income of New York is so low compared to its cost of living, so a New Yorker, on average, might be better off moving to Alaska, but not by as much as some other state, I'd wager.

My surprise got me thinking, so I did a tiny bit of excel analysis, where I normalized median wages[0] based on the value of a dollar data[1], then sorted states based on normalized median wage / cost of living[2]. Utah, Nebraska, Virginia, Iowa, and Wyoming are the top 5 with that ratio, while Hawaii, New York, DC, California and Oregon (Oregon pips Alaska here, by one rank, but my point stands, Alaska is many things, but cheap isn't one of them) are the bottom 5. I think that maps roughly with my intuition that big coastal places are sort of expensive for their average salaries and that boring, but not poor places are cheap for their salaries. I'm not sure this is relevant to the indie dev who doesn't have an employer, but for those of us who work in the flesh, I guess we should go to Utah?

[0] https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/statemedian/ [1] http://taxfoundation.org/blog/real-value-100-each-state [2] http://www.missourieconomy.org/indicators/cost_of_living/ind...

[monknomo]

I think you're thinking of Nebraska or other cheap states. Alaska, Hawaii and other remote places have never been cheap to live in