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Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

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Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#291

Post by pgcj_poster »

joyeuse6701 wrote: post #275
ta1234567890 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 prov…

> I don't see all lives as equal

?!

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#292

Post by cheez »

bigred100 wrote: post #283
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My personal opinion is that the average person is struggling not to die of obesity or become diabetic, not be massively in debt, take reasonably good care of their kids, attain a reasonable level of education, etc. So from this perspective nobody really cares about a computer programmer getting to do an interesting project for a year. As for government funding for interesting projects, the way you get these is submit…

> My personal opinion is that the average person is struggling not to die of obesity or become diabetic, not be massively in debt, take reasonably good care of their kids, attain a reasonable level of education, etc. So from this perspective nobody really cares about a computer programmer getting to do an interesting project for a year.

This is so poetically stated.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#294

Post by [deleted] »

cryptica wrote: post #289
Jimmc414 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is so much wrong with this post, I don't know where to begin. It scares me how quickly the US population is turning on entrepreneurs. Do you really believe starting a company is the easier route? Is it better to just complain and demand tax payers equalize all opportunities for non risk takers like yourself?

I'm pretty sure that I've taken more risks than most entrepreneurs. It's a mistake to assume that if someone is not financially successful, that they haven't taken risks. This kind of logic was never accurate and it's getting even less so over time. There is a lot of talent and there are many really great projects which go unnoticed these days. Our entire economy is founded on hype and misinformation. It's no longer…

[deleted]

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#295

Post by lopmotr »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #281

> "The list of innovations we need is long: clean and cheap energy, better crops, interventions to help against the diseases that shorten and impair our lives. This, and much more besides, is needed to make progress against the big problems we face. But while the demand for innovation is large, its supply is limited." Yes and no. What we need is better problem identification and more appropriate priorities. For examp…

Reducing waste can only go so far - zero waste - and worse, it has diminishing returns. Improving technology, on the other hand, has no upper bound and builds on itself to enable even more improvements.

Imagine if people had just reduced food waste instead of inventing fertilizer? We probably wouldn't have western civilization.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#296

Post by lopmotr »

Frost1x wrote: post #17
ryanmarsh wrote: post #8

Opportunity is often missed because it looks like work.

The availability of opportunity itself has diminished. Fewer and fewer opportunities are made available by those who hold the keys to the gates. Often, when one of the now fewer gates to opportunity open, much less is offered inside than was historically there and the risks to benefits to open those doors is increasing across the board. I'd say it's too simplistic to imply people don't seek opportunity because it req…

Older opportunities only looked easy because they'd be easy for us in our more powerful position of knowledge and resources. It wasn't easy for an uneducated medieval peasant to discover the laws of electromagnetism. Even the most advantaged people didn't know what to look for. Plenty of failures happened in alchemy/witchcraft/religion/etc. that people dedicated their lives to for nothing because they didn't have our advantage of knowledge.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#297

Post by reality_counts »

username90 wrote: post #107

We shouldn't worry about finding the talent who can work as researchers, first we should worry about finding the talent who can reliably work as modern farmers or in factories. That is what Africa is missing before it can take the next step towards becoming a modern society.

All African nations have very low average IQ scores.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#298

Post by davidajackson »

friendlybus wrote: post #238
davidajackson wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>there’s no x10 improvement in anything interesting Don't you think trusting code to transmit and trade assets is a x10 improvement over trusting people? I'd rather trust code I can audit than people. Even if you don't call it an x10, I would definitely call it a success.

You can't choose between tech and people. You have to trust both.

Not with crypto. It's trustless. That statement is a blanket statement that might seem correct at first but technically is completely wrong when it comes to crypto and well implemented smart contracts. See "The Byzantine Generals Problem": https://decryptionary.com/dictionary/byzantine-generals-prob....

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#299

Post by plasticchris »

tempguy9999 wrote: post #212
criddell wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an impressive list and it's entirely different than what mine would look like. My list would be entirely focused around quality of life and happiness which would mean significant funding for artistic endeavors. It also might lead to slowing the rate we communicate, living healthier (not necessarily longer) lives, building stable communities which might lead to less long distance movement (which would likely be…

I'm going to be a bit bolshy here. Every time I see or hear the word Art, my back goes up. I'd never say that art is worthless, it might be one of the few valuable things in life, but a lot of Art that gets done seems to have no value, even aesthetic. What art would you say is a valuable artistic endeavour? To note, I can quite consider science to be largely artistic (as well as applied philosophy), so it's not a cle…

Writing? I think that's the basic human creative act, putting thoughts to paper - words, music, whatever

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#300

Post by api »

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…

Unfortunately your suggestion will lead to a flood of scam phony prototypes to scoop up grant money. It'll be like the worst of Kickstarter on a larger scale.

Deploying capital with discernment is extremely hard. VCs put a lot of effort into it and often fail pretty badly, and VCs are probably better at it than the government bureaucrats who would administer the program you're suggesting.

Part of what makes it really hard is that there's often an inverse relationship between appearance and reality. Fakes, delusional nuts, and con artists usually appear more polished than the real innovators. The real innovators are spending all their time and energy innovating while the phonies are spending all their energy on flash and self-promotion.

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