Great article. I would like to further suggest we end the use of the word "war" in contexts that do not involve mandatory conscription and the deaths of large numbers of combatants until one side totally surrenders. (This implies there is a "side" to be able to surrender.) Politicians have so destroyed the word "war" that it's impossible to have a reasonable discussion about any use of violence by the state. Perhaps that was the goal. Don't know.

Drug use is a health-related issue, whether it is a doctor prescribing medications, a patient taking meds off-label, a person self-medicating, an addict, or some kind experimentation. All of these situations are much more personal health concerns than public safety concerns. Yes, addiction is a terrible tragedy and sometimes danger for the rest of us -- but it's a personal disaster a long time before it affects any of us. I'd argue that in the aggregate most addicts suffer a lot more personally than any damage they inflict on society.

We have a caricatured view of the drug addict -- the unwashed, illiterate, toothless junkie hiding out in a crack house. Yes, addiction ends up that way for some, but by and large addicts are middle-class, educated, and live in houses with their friends or families. Hollywood and moralists have done us a great disservice by putting these horrible outlier pictures in people's heads when they think of drug use. Take for instance the word "addict", which like the word "war" is such a broad term that it doesn't have much meaning on it's own without further clarification. One side wants you to believe that all drug use consists of PhDs smoking pot while talking astronomy. The other side wants you to believe that all drug use ends in addiction and death. People need to stop with the histrionics.

I support legalization, although I am extremely cautious personally when it comes to drug use. I might support criminalization of dealing hard drugs. I'd have to think about it a bit. But declaring "war" on our own population is a pretty idiotic way to spend our social resources if you ask me. Just like the "war on poverty," the "war on illiteracy," the "war on obesity," and the "culture war," enough with the wars already.

In 2009 I started a company with another guy, and I used to read articles like this, about how startups are so very difficult, and how you have to put everything on the line, your health, your wealth, your relationships, everything. It's a very common theme in startup-land, and I constantly hear from founders who sacrificed their marriages, worked 19 hour days, slept under their desks, and racked up tens of thousands in credit card debt, all to make their dream a reality. The message is very clear: you have to be willing to do anything to succeed. Articles like this fed my ego, and made me feel like I was part of an elite cadre of founders. Then my startup failed, leaving myself and my cofounder with tens of thousands in debt and a pretty rough mess to clean up.

In the meantime, a good friend of mine who started a little project on the side slowly grew it over a period of a couple years into something that supports his family very well and has a good shot at doing millions in revenue within the next 5-10 years. And I don't think he's been very stressed while doing it. He loves what he does, has tons of time for his family, etc. The cynical among us might term this a "lifestyle business" and they'd be right. But I don't think that bothers him and I can't say I blame him.

There's this really ugly side of the startup world that drives founders to completely unreasonable levels in pursuit of fast wealth creation, and it comes as a result of two factors: founders are naturally ambitious, driven people, and investors are in a hit-driven business. So the result is that investors naturally gravitate towards founders who either hit a billion dollars in a few years, or die trying (sometimes literally), and then investors and founders both are incentivized to craft this story that they only way to win is to win big, fast, and with all your chips on the line. And these things become self-reinforcing, so you have investors talking about how the real reason startups are so valuable is that founders can work so hard that they accomplish a career's worth of work in just a few years. The message is clear: you need to work 90 hours a week and either be the next Dropbox or flame out. And for the model most investors work under, that's the only way they really make money.

But the more I look around, the more I wonder if there's really much correlation between blowing your life up and startup success. Yes, you hear a lot of successful founders talking about how they killed themselves to get there. But thanks to survivorship bias, you don't hear from all the ones who risked everything, turned their lives and relationships and health upside down, and then lost. And increasingly, I'm seeing a lot of examples of very successful founders who definitely work hard, but keep an eye on themselves, their health, their relationships, etc. and have lines they're just not willing to cross. 37signals is the classic example here, but there are scores of others, many of them right here on HN. The key seems to be patience and humility, two things a lot of 20-something founders (including myself) have in very short supply

Maybe startups are so hard because we're doing them wrong.

GoDaddy is uniquely influential because they're an Internet company. Members of Congress aren't surprised to find movie studios supporting a bill like SOPA. But when an Internet company does, it gives the bill a (false) appearance of broader support. Which is presumably why GoDaddy was recruited by whoever recruited them.

  There is only one valid definition of a business purpose:
  to create a customer.

No. The one valid definition of a business purpose is this: A business should do what the owners want it to do. Otherwise, the notion of ownership loses meaning.

If the owners want to create lots of customers, they do that. If they would rather have a smaller number of highly profitable customers, they do that. If they want to create a nice side business so that they can surf in the summer and snowboard in the winter, they do that.

Scottish philosopher David Hume drew an essential distinction between factual matters—is—and moral matters—ought. Asking "What should a business do?" looks like a Humean ought, but it's actually a Humean is. A business is a vehicle for achieving the ends of its owners. How then can we make sense of the maxim "a business should maximize shareholder value"? In certain kinds of businesses—especialy those owned by a large number of shareholders—the interests of the owners may generally conflict, but they can usually agree on one thing: maximize the value of the company. This describes virtually all publicly traded companies and many family businesses as well. It doesn't describe, e.g., my present business (the Ruby on Rails Tutorial), which I created as a 4-Hour Work Week–style product company to let me relax for a while, travel the world in style, and have the financial freedom to develop longer-range plans for world domination. Its purpose is definitely not to maximize shareholder value; I'm the only shareholder, so it does whatever I damn well tell it to do.

Let the owners worry about what a company ought to do. Unless you're an owner, it's none of your business.

Incorporation is a privilege granted by society; and property rights are never absolute. What you state is extremely individualistic, but it is unrealistic and naive for the same reason. I understand your exhortation, but it does not amount to an argument. For example, most large companies with broad shareholder bases have no owner interests that you can easily point to; the shareholder base has collective action problems, and frequently cannot meaningfully affect the company.

I think you're at risk of deriving an ought from an is yourself. You take capitalist ownership structures, which exist for the hopeful progress of society at large, but you infer an ought from them, that the only thing that is fair is that ownership is absolute in control over what it owns.