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Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

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Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#221

Post by sokoloff »

jlokier wrote: post #181
kortilla wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Giving people money at minimum redistributes wealth, so it cannot possibly be any worse Of course it will. Basic income is so expensive that the wealth don’t have enough to take to fund it. It’s going to require massive taxes in the middle class that result in a quality of life loss.

I think the parent is a variation on the "poor should stay poor, rich should stay rich" argument. With the poor not mentioned, and implicitly not counted. Any cash given to the poorer classes and taken from the middle classes likely has greater quality of life value to the poorer classes - because it would be used for things that are more essential to life. This means the quality of life loss to the middle classes is…

Shall we take a kidney from the healthy to transplant into those with need? If we don't, are we essentially saying "people with kidney failure don't matter"?

Many voters in the middle class feel like they've worked (and continue to work) very hard to get where they are and object to the meager spoils of their work being taken for redistribution. Right or wrong, it's a very real feeling. (Obviously, I'm not saying dollars are kidneys, but they will cause a similar reaction in people.)

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#222

Post by ta1234567890 »

joyeuse6701 wrote: post #206
ta1234567890 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you are saying that free money is not a solution. Ok, then what is a solution? Also, how do you measure and compare corruption? The US has gone to war killing millions of people, including hundreds of thousands of their own, motivated by (oil/industrial-military) money and justified with lies. The US political system is controlled mostly by corporations and rich people that pay for lobbying. So are you saying the…

I do agree with the sentiment that via political donations the U.S. political system is corrupted, but I hope you can offer a citation for the millions killed and hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens, and a clear cause and effect of the stated motivation, please. I think most of what you said is an overstatement, not to belittle those that suffered because of greed.

You are right, millions might be an exaggeration, I was going off of numbers read elsewhere online.

Here's a source that estimates total deaths, post-9/11 so far (by November 2018) at hundreds of thousands: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/20...

That doesn't take into account the previous war with Iraq.

By the way, I never said US citizens. Do you think US citizens' lives are somehow more important than people from other parts of the world?

Also, oil/greed seems to be the most apparent motivation (you might want to watch the movie Vice, or just revise non-US media coverage from the time).

It would be great if you could provide a source that has a clear (real) cause/effect of whatever motivated the US to start a war with Iraq and Afghanistan, and please don't say weapons of mass destruction.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#223

Post by Data_Junkie »

toyg wrote: post #18
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…

Capital is not underappreciated - it is hidden by owners. Because their power and wealth comes from control of a scarce, hidden resource. If everyone had access to capital, nobody would be “on top”, and that’s unacceptable to the owning classes.

OP meant the importance of it compared to ability.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#224

Post by petra »

paulcole wrote: post #100
petra wrote: post #2

How many talented people , in advanced economies, with good technical degrees , do take part in inventing important stuff ? Very few. Educating more kids and having more "ideas" won't change that. We're not lacking ideas. We're lacking the right incentives to make ideas happen.

I mean virtually nobody does anything that's important, whether they're talented or not or have a good degree or not. We're pretty good at fooling ourselves into thinking what we're doing is important though.

Not necessarily important as in "single handedly curing cancer". But taking part in an important thing , even in a small role, is important.

But so much talent is wasted on insignificant things.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#225

Post by eaenki »

toasterlovin wrote: post #191
eaenki wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In your quest to rattle of glib retorts, you have failed to bother even reading the list. There are about a dozen countries with similar levels of corruption as Switzerland, Sweden, Canada, and New Zealand. And then there’s a whole bunch of other countries that are pretty close.

Yes I barely checked the index because the index I consider good from the UN doesn’t list them as the least corrupted ones. This is a perceived index. I’m pretty skeptical of Sweden, NZ and CA being corruption free. They don’t have anything exceptional to back it up anyway.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#226

Post by mch82 »

abakker wrote: post #93
bumby wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I agree but the question seems to be how do we lower the barriers smartly while still keeping the intent of the rules and regulations? Add to it our own bias to put more emphasis on the regulations that concretely prevent us from doing what we want now, rather than those that abstractly benefit us and its easy to point to them being the problem. It's like the "one mans trash is another mans treasure" cliche,…

The real question is: why did we install the protections(barriers) in the first place? I assume that a major component of that was as a reaction to the increasing complexity of modern life. Self sufficiency is fine, but it is difficult to take the consequences for many things knowingly. As such, we created, one at a time, experientially driven barriers designed to protect people from new, novel issues. I don’t think…

“Refactoring” is great word choice. It implies there might be a set of test scenarios we check against before revising a law to make sure we don’t break the intent. It also sets an expectation for continuous improvement.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#227

Post by eaenki »

danenania wrote: post #220
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…

If you offer millions of dollars to anyone with a far fetched idea and a prototype, everyone will have a far fetched idea and a prototype, and you'll need some way to filter millions of applicants down to the 30k you can afford to give the money. It would be extremely competitive, just like VC is now, and picking the winners smartly/fairly would be just as difficult. This doesn't mean that having some public subsidie…

I don’t know. According to personal experience and to Chamath and Peter Thiel, a lot of great people doing great things can’t raise anything beyond friends and family.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#228

Post by mch82 »

cwingrav wrote: post #30
petra wrote: post #2

How many talented people , in advanced economies, with good technical degrees , do take part in inventing important stuff ? Very few. Educating more kids and having more "ideas" won't change that. We're not lacking ideas. We're lacking the right incentives to make ideas happen.

(US centric comment) I'll add that we're making it less likely people will take risks and act on their ideas with student debt and a lack of healthcare. People can't take risks if they don't have a cushion to rely on and risk their lives (or face massive debt) if a non-trivial health concern occurs. Compounding this is a draw back of social programs to get people back on their feet if their risk turns south. I'm not…

People are also less likely to speak up about problems at work when they must worry about losing healthcare along with a job.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#229

Post by mncharity »

petra wrote: post #2

How many talented people , in advanced economies, with good technical degrees , do take part in inventing important stuff ? Very few. Educating more kids and having more "ideas" won't change that. We're not lacking ideas. We're lacking the right incentives to make ideas happen.

> We're lacking the right incentives to make ideas happen.

Perhaps it's also not what our industrial policy is tuned for? In California, if a company kills a project, the staff might go elsewhere to pursue it, but that can be harder in states which enforce non-competes. Similarly, in China, if a supplier drops a product, you might go elsewhere for it, which can be harder in the US which has patent law tuned for exclusivity. A great deal of VR/AR tech has vanished into FAMG, and become unavailable for anyone else in the US to "make ideas happen". Part of why China accepted trade war as the lesser of evils.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#230

Post by paulcole »

eaenki wrote: post #169
paulcole wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My solution is: take a piece of the federal budget and give $1-3MM to anyone with a far fetched idea that has a prototype to back it up So giving millions to people who are already privileged enough to have access to the tools/resources/education to make to a prototype?

You usually can make a prototype of literally anything with less than $10K. Education on the internet is free. And the internet itself is free at any Starbucks.

$10k is an unthinkable amount of money to spend on a prototype for the vast majority of Americans.
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