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Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

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Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#271

Post by cryptonector »

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…

> 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. No long processes. If 30K -mostly students- a year get a mill to develop their thing, I suspect we would find ourselves way into the future in just a decade. And that’s just $30-90B/y

We already do this with grants at all levels of government. And guess what: it's a highly political activity, and prone to corruption. What's a remotely good idea?

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#272

Post by adamsea »

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’m not sure this applies if you’re 5, or if you’re ten. Quality education during formative years seems invaluable.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#273

Post by southerndrift »

inimino wrote: post #183
southerndrift wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I am missing some subtleties, but why is talent not money? >The Homeric talent "as money" was probably the gold equivalent of the value of an ox or a cow.[2] Based on a statement from a later Greek source that "the talent of Homer was equal in amount to the later Daric [... i.e.] two Attic drachmas" and analysis of finds from a Mycenaean grave-shaft, a weight of about 8.4 gm can be established for this money ta…

It was a (rather heavy) weight, and only a unit "of money" by extension. A Homeric talent was a unit of weight, hence the half-talent " of gold " as a prize. A talent of silver would weigh the same but have less value. The Hebrew "talent" (kikar) was also a unit of weight. The later Latin talentum borrowed the existing weight measure and the Greek word τάλαντον and by the time of the parable of the talents, this word…

>The only thing we can say with confidence about these "goods" is that they were heavy, and not necessarily something you want... especially if they are to be repaid "with usury" at some future undisclosed time of reckoning, as in the story!

But having talents, isn't that essence of being human? Having talents and using them? Who are we if we fear having talents?

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#274

Post by nradov »

tempguy9999 wrote: post #209
nradov wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a taxpayer I'm not interested in paying people to take a year off. If they want to do that they can save up their own money.

That's the sound of a door being slammed very hard with no consideration of what you may get back in return. The whole model of giving people tax money to do work is called research and is quite a large area and has produced some amazingly valuable things that you benefit from. BTW I do see what you mean, but I have been trying to start a company for ages and getting the money together is just incredibly hard. It's a…

I support government funding for basic research as long as there is proper oversight and accountability. That's a totally different situation.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#275

Post by joyeuse6701 »

ta1234567890 wrote: post #222
joyeuse6701 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 imp…

I'm limiting it to U.S. citizens (soldiers) because I can with some confidence say that U.S. policy at least can be traced as a cause of their death.

No, I don't think US citizen's lives are more important defacto, but I don't see all lives as equal either, for the record.

Oil/greed fit the leftist narrative, but I'm not convinced, and since you made the claim that it's about oil and greed, the onus is on you to prove it! I don't have to provide motivation of my own, though I suspect two planes crashing into a building might have something to do with it.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#276

Post by alibaba_x »

moltar wrote: post #75
sdiq wrote: post #57

I think the better question would have been, how would Steve Jobs have ended up if he were born in Syria

Not identical example. But Elon Musk was born in South Africa. Far from Syria, but still not a major world economic Center.

His mother also had Canadian citizenship which allowed him to move to Canada at age 17.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#277

Post by jshowa3 »

The worst part isn't lacking opportunity. It's knowing that you lack the ability and are forced to live your life that way without any ability to do anything about it.

Opportunity is at least, largely changeable. Ability isn't.

Being average is the worst thing imaginable in today's society because nobody cares about average people.

I would give up anything to have the brain of an inventor. But it's something that has constantly haunted my mind knowing that I will always be sub-par.

It's even worse when you go through school and you're a top performer in your school work. You're given a false sense of being one of the best, only to be exposed in the real world as a complete fraud.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#278

Post by jlokier »

sokoloff wrote: post #221
jlokier wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dol…

I disagree only with the grandparent post's argument that an administrative approach would be bad because a subset of people would be worse off under it.

I think that type of reasoning is fallacious because every policy leaves a subset of people worse off (you can just choose your preferred subset to make the point). Including the status quo.

I like your kidney analogy, and I think it makes a strong counter point that is worth considering when weighing up policy ideas.

Though, the status quo in that analogy looks to me like the majority of people in the world currently are having one kidney removed during childhood, mostly to feed the middle classes and build toys for them. Some unlucky ones have two; they are sick and dying. But we couldn't take a kidney from the healthy middle class folks to give back to those, could we, because voters in the middle class feel like they've worked (and continue to work) very hard to get their kidney from some unspecified source we don't like to think about, and they object to the meager spoils of their hard-earned spare kidney being taken for redistribution back to the people they came from.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#279

Post by jlokier »

SkyBelow wrote: post #251
jlokier wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is only if you outright ignore the second+ order effects of doing such and the incentives created.

I agree with you; that's what I meant when I said I don't agree personally with simplistic redistribution.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#280

Post by jlokier »

sokoloff wrote: post #215
jlokier wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see parallels too, but trickle down economics is about sending capital "up" in the hope that what's produced trickles back down from wealthy people, whereas the idea of investing in lots of people is more like sending capital "down", or at least sideways. I think a plausible factor in the failures of trickle down economics to enrich the masses as much as hoped by those who advocate it, is wealthy groups of people a…

The minute you give a bunch of people $1-3MM as upthread ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21034871 ), you're sending $30-90BB "up", by definition, from the perspective of the typical American (median household wealth of $97,300). It's perhaps just not as far up, so not as far that it needs to trickle down, but it seems more or less the same on a zoomed out level and puts the recipients at 10-30x the median weal…

I think the proposed idea is not supposed to allow people to simply invest the money and live off the proceeds.

Just like when a VC or government grant agency gives you money, you can't simply invest it and live off the proceeds in those cases either.

With that ruled out, the $1-3MM is not really the recipient's money, and they are not really wealthy in the way you are comparing to other households.

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