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Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

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Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#151

Post by briandear »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #65
easytiger wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a slippery slope as to whom you disenfranchised to redistributed that cash: but it will inevitably be a large group of people in the middle, not the minority elite you sold the policy on. If some people can't accumulate something they can't do bigger things as creators or create bigger markets as consumers.

You won't disenfranchise anyone, because the investment will more than pay for itself. That's the point. It's just another form of seed funding for ambitious start-ups. And $30bn/yr is absolutely trivial compared to the opportunity costs of an economy geared more to financialisation and regressive wealth extraction than to productive engineering and invention.

If you take an extra $20k from me per year in the form of taxes, how does some kid’s invention actually pay me back? Am I a shareholder in this project? Will I get a return on that $20k? Will the government give me my $20k back plus a profit?

This silly proposal is nothing more than socialized venture capital. We have real venture capital who invest in “far fetched” ideas already — and they have willing participants who know what they are getting into — not people being forced, literally at the point of a gun, through taxes.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#152

Post by davidajackson »

eaenki wrote: post #81
dteiml wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Peter Thiel doing that with the Thiel Grants? Pretty successful so far (projects Ethereum, Aragorn... founded by grantees).

I once regarded Ethereum as the the only successful project out of it. But is it? Did it create anything meaningfully better? Not really. Anyway, yes. And Peter Thiel’s fellowship is great. It’s just that he doesn’t have $30B a year to spare on that

Decentralized scripting that large numbers of developers know how to use is powerful. Entire parts of the internet could shift to that in the long term. Obviously, it's a long way away... but that's a given. Even if you choose another crypto and say it has a better approach because of x, y and z mining or other infra, you can't argue with the fact that Ethereum has increased the competition in the space.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#153

Post by vinceguidry »

jzebedee wrote: post #149
vinceguidry wrote: post #148

I was talking to someone the other day that boiled it down to "everyone's trying to solve their Red Queen problem." I was unfamiliar, and the Wikipedia page doesn't seem to support this reading, but the idea is that everyone's running as fast as they can just to stay in place, and the way out is different for every person so no general approach can work for everyone. Any solution will put people right back in the rea…

Albert Camus - The Myth of Sisyphus https://web.archive.org/web/20190808163312/https://www2.hawa...

Aha, thanks! I'd always sided with Kierkegaard, maybe I should give Camus his fair shake.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#154

Post by briandear »

inimino wrote: post #59
easytiger wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you didn't read the test of the comments then. I perfectly justified my comment, what have you contributed

Yes I did, and no you did not. You made a drive-by shoot-down of an innocent idea without suggesting a better one or giving a single valid reason why you feel the idea is bad. If you don't have something to say that will improve the situation then maybe you should not comment.

The idea is bad because you just created an involuntary venture capital fund by taking money from people that didn’t necessarily want to “invest” it. It’s also a bad idea because we already have venture capitalist who fund “far fetched” ideas using money from willing participants rather than the public coffers.

If you want to encourage more innovation, cut taxes on investment and capital gains to make it cheaper to invest. Cut regulations to make it easier for upstarts to disrupt the entrenched.

But a national million dollar giveaway program for wild ideas? What could possibly go wrong?

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#155

Post by eaenki »

teddyh wrote: post #125
eaenki wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switzerland, Norway and who else exactly? Out of 100+ countries

Full list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index

It would have been faster if you just replied with “CA and NZ”, since those are the only other countries on that list, which btw, I’m skeptical of.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#156

Post by viach »

eaenki wrote: post #9

Imo Education is overvalued, Capital is under appreciated, And, Because Capital is trapped into networks, that Capital is squandered among an infinite array of companies employing the talent and producing products that don’t make you, or the planet, better, healthier, smarter or happier. (Apple’s SJ era, Google until 2014~ and Tesla fit the useful smarter happier paradigma, and not many other) My solution is: take a…

Who will decide what projects to fund? Officials with good networking you mentioned?

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#157

Post by umvi »

eaenki wrote: post #9

Imo Education is overvalued, Capital is under appreciated, And, Because Capital is trapped into networks, that Capital is squandered among an infinite array of companies employing the talent and producing products that don’t make you, or the planet, better, healthier, smarter or happier. (Apple’s SJ era, Google until 2014~ and Tesla fit the useful smarter happier paradigma, and not many other) My solution is: take a…

Actually I think creativity and innovation is best stimulated under limitations and constraints, not with blank checks

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#158

Post by eaenki »

marcinzm wrote: post #146
eaenki wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, the twist is those are far fetched and they have a prototype. e.g If you want to build a reusable rocket and you already have something 100 times smaller, kind of working but not really and one contract to be paid upon delivery, that's good enough, most likely, when there are 30 companies building reusable rockets and 29970 more a year doing other far fetched things, in theory

Many of those Kickstarters also had or claimed to have prototypes. Let's use your example. I can buy a small reusable toy rocket at a hobby store. It will fly up a few hundred feet and come down by parachute in one piece. I can build a somewhat bigger one from pieces as well, there's college competitions around such things. That provides about 0.0001% of the work, skills, etc. needed to build one that can reach orbit…

Well, that would function as a seed round. And having a breakthrough would mean it’s proprietary. Aka you didn’t buy it at the hobby store. If you have a prototype demonstrating a breakthrough that’s enough imo. I can only recall Oculus from kickstarter and it has been fairly successful

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#159

Post by jrandm »

dahart wrote: post #91
elliekelly wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A handful of far-fetched ideas have added more economic value to the world than every diploma combined. I’m not sure we could even assign a dollar value to crazy ideas like satellites or the internet because the positive externalities they’ve created are so far-reaching. Crazy ideas a lot harder to evaluate, and a lot riskier, but they’re definitely not less valuable.

The crazy ideas you cite as examples came from people with diplomas.

Can substitute airplanes[0] and computer games/graphics[1], though if we have to be that pedantic I found a couple names[2] in the history of satellites section of wikipedia that don't seem to have formal education beyond a military technical school.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers#Early_career_a...

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack#Early_life

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstantin_Tsiolkovsky and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Poto%C4%8Dnik

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#160

Post by newdaynewuser »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #132
eaenki wrote: post #9

Imo Education is overvalued, Capital is under appreciated, And, Because Capital is trapped into networks, that Capital is squandered among an infinite array of companies employing the talent and producing products that don’t make you, or the planet, better, healthier, smarter or happier. (Apple’s SJ era, Google until 2014~ and Tesla fit the useful smarter happier paradigma, and not many other) My solution is: take a…

I don't think just giving the money to whoever has a prototype is a good idea. Some culturally relevant projects aren't the sort of thing you can make a prototype of, but I like where you're going. I'd amend it like so: Once I've been a citizen long enough (i.e. paid enough taxes) I get to invoke my free year, which is a year where the government pays me enough to cover my bills and maybe a bit extra for projects and…

If it is voting contest then I am afraid we will end up with reality shows like Kardashian pretending to be working on idea.

Maybe requirement should be voting on projects have to be anonymous. Public cannot know projects owner completion of funding rounds

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