Hacking Capitalism: Modeling, Humans, Computers, and Money.

by Kris Nóva

My recommendation is that you position yourself as a trusted thought leader for the organization. Begin to influence the organizations toward a hopeful future. Be the voice of hope in the company.

if you want to be awarded even the most baseline of merit, you’ll need to be able to broadcast messages that are so clear that they’ll be impossible to challenge.

If your goal is to escalate yourself to the inner elite circles of the tech industry, influence is going to be how you’ll get there faster than your peers.

A quick way to influence someone or a group of people is to give them your ideas.

Perhaps an even simpler way of communicating is to break your message into two questions: What is it? Why does it matter?

My direct advice would be to be tactful with social media. The moment that social becomes an escape, a form of comfort, a quick hit of dopamine, or a surrogate therapist, that can be extremely dangerous.

Treat social media the same way that you treat work. Have a plan, know what you want out of it, and use it to get what you’re after.

One of my good friends often reminds me that careers are fantastically long.

As you exist in the tech industry, you can think of yourself as a glacier. There will be factors that support your ability to grow and expand in size. And there will also be factors that wear on you and those that cause you to burn resources or deplete them over time.

If you were a glacier, you’d begin your career in a state of receding faster than you can replenish.

Explains widespread depression in the young

You can sometimes offset the need to overexert yourself with automation.

Perhaps the reason that the tech industry has flourished in the United States is because of its relentless obsession with competition. In other countries, perhaps there isn’t as much reward for using technologies as competitive tools.

I suggest starting to measure your smiles per day.

The takeaway is that you should feel something other than the need to overexert yourself in capitalism.

Endurance is more about your ability to recharge than it is about your ability to exert.

Endurance is measured by the rate that you can recharge to the point that you can once again exert your original effort.

It’s more effective to have a sustained pace that’s slightly faster than your competition than it is to have an extremely fast pace that’s short lived.

Collaboration is the key to endurance.

You might try to find yourself a group of like-minded hackers to partner with. Identify a common goal, and cover one another while others recharge.

Resource Allocation is the ability to map resources required to complete a task, with a specific interval of task performance.

For example, you can use a year as a yardstick to gauge work and labor. You can gain an understanding for how much time you need to recharge each year.

European Union legislation mandates that all 27 member states must by law grant all employees a minimum of 4 weeks of paid vacation.

Capitalism likes to view regeneration requirements as operating costs. Somewhere along the way we’ve lost track of the idea that operating costs are more than just money.

Time, effort, energy, and focus are all resources that you as a technologist can spend.

Focus as resource

Sustainable Design is the practice of ensuring that the outcomes of a particular system contribute to the resources required to execute the system.

Eg. Hybrid braking

You can—with enough attention to detail—design systems such that you can recycle the outputs of one system and use them as inputs in your system.

Capitalism rewards competitive personality types while simultaneously trying to consume more resources than it can replenish.

Similar to financial debt, technical debt can often spiral out of control. A single poor decision can lead to future circumstances that further compound the debt.

This threshold where the cost outweighs the reward due to technical debt, is known as technical bankruptcy.

Your first step is to identify your intended outcome.

If it takes a team of engineers several weeks to do a task that would’ve otherwise taken a few moments, you need to carefully convey that. And you’ll need to show that an alternative will be viable.

You can visualize sustainable tactics in tech by envisioning systems as small factories that need inputs in exchange for outputs.

You can observe your systems. You can then capture data about the resources that they need to operate. As you understand the resources, you can make projections about what you need to sustain your systems over time.

Given finite resources, it’ll quickly become apparent to you whether your systems can replenish themselves quickly enough to continue operating.

You should understand that you can use cooperation to help organizations work together to create stronger products.

I want to buy as much land as possible and give it back to society and to the people.

Ultimately, the best self-investments that I’ve made in my lifetime have been nonmaterial. The people who I’ve surrounded myself with, the knowledge I’ve gained by being around them, and the education that I’ve given myself have been the only investments that have truly compounded my returns.

Appreciate your workshop when you have it, but be prepared to work without it.

Whether you’re hacking the economy or hacking a computer system, your first steps remain the same: Select your target and then to begin probing for weaknesses.

AI: poor marketing, incumbent slowness, lack of understanding of consumer

For every goal, there’s a set of actions that will get you there.

Connecting your goals to what you want in return can help you stay focused.

As you figure out what you want from a company, you can begin to map your needs to possible weaknesses or responsive endpoints.

And if that might be your goal, you’ll also need to gauge which companies' stock prices are more likely to go up.

Will Microsoft give you access to relationships? Mentorship? Knowledge? Experience?

Given my experience in the tech industry, once I begin to focus on a specific company, my next steps are similar to social engineering.

I begin reading articles on Reddit, following leaders on Twitter, researching problems shared from previous employees, and so on.

You can start to probe for weaknesses by looking for a response. In career exploitation, this can be a response to a tweet, a LinkedIn message, or an email.

In hacking the economy, you’ll perform a company scan, which will identify the types of product development that seem to be getting attention in a particular organization.

Your goal is to figure out exactly where you could fit into the organization or—more importantly—what you could offer the organization.

There’s an art to identifying an organization’s needs from the outside. A lot of it comes from practicing, communicating, networking, and quickly identifying problems.