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Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

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Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a lot of rhetoric, but I don't know if your response is any more substantive. At least if we're talking about college degrees rather than high school diplomas, OP may be correct: https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-American-adults-had... We sent a man to the moon in 1969. At the time, half of Americans didn't have a high school diploma, and just 10% had a college degree. In the 1940s and early 1950s, when…

> Do you think the same society that did those things couldn't have invented the Internet and Facebook? Society didn't invent those things. People with the education conveyed from a college degree did. As was almost every notable invention and discovery of the past 80 years. This is not controversial.

Sure. The question. Is what is the benefit of sending the other 95% of people to college? Those people were certainly educated enough to operate the economy that underpinned and made those achievements possible.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... .

This model ignores the areas where you need trust and focuses instead on making an impenetrable black box for communications. That might be useful, but you can still be backstabbed by the other generals, or your soldiers or the programmer who put something fun in the implementation.

Bitconnect, mtgox and every other imploded bitcoin service illustrates the point to the tune of billions.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#303
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You still haven’t actually provided any evidence for your position. At this point, you’re just some person on the Internet with strong opinions. Most people on this site won’t take you seriously because our lived experience is in the first world and corruption is not a thing most of us have ever encountered.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#304
One problem I see in education today is that we give lots of extra resources to kids with learning problems, behavior problems, and physical handicaps, but not many resources go to gifted kids because "they'll do okay on their own". Yes, they might do "okay", but they might turn into brilliant innovators if they were given the same extra attention that the kids below the median get.

This article is specifically about kids who score above average in math in 3rd grade. As a society, we have chosen (or someone has) to provide extra teaching staff to help kids that are below the median, not the ones who are exceptional.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#305

Capital is so trapped up that people don't even have the capital to take care of basic needs.

Seems to me capital is not just ordinary resources. More like when preservation or a positive return is intended in a businesslike situation, even though negative returns are often encountered. Other people's money can be used to leverage some amazing outcomes. When capitalism is dominated by greedy capitalists, basic needs are not intended to be taken care of, since no return on that type investment can be recognize…

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Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#306

If I hadn't had to work jobs just to keep food on the table, I'd have invented the things I did A LOT earlier. I'd probably be finished rewriting the internet's protocols by now, instead of only being 30% of the way there. But that's not how this world works. Most of the early discoveries were by affluent people or had benefactors and didn't need jobs and thus actually had time.

People forget how art worked during the Renaissance - wealthy benefactors paid thr bills for the great Artists we remember.

Thats not how Corporations work.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#307
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…

> Education is overvalued, Capital is under appreciated,

Capitalists downplay the importance of capital and highlight stories that distract from it because recognition of the importance of capital would lead to intolerance of the concentration of capital.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#308
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name one company that raised its first million with an IPO in the last few decades. Let alone one that did so while producing something like Google

Last few decades? You do know that includes the dot com boom that was filled with tech companies doing early IPOs with basically nothing to show? Also, the only reason early IPOs aren’t popular anymore is because capital is so easy to get from VCs, despite what you’re suggesting. The difference is that you want money without a business plan or a plan to grow, which is not how private, nor public, money should be squa…

> You do know that includes the dot com boom that was filled with tech companies doing early IPOs with basically nothing to show?

And, even so, exactly zero of those, AFAIK, were so early as to have raised their first million that way, underlining the grandparent’s point.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#309

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…

It doesn't matter how many risks you take. What counts is taking the right risks.

Fiat currency works fine. Bitcoin only has value for money laundering and drug deals; its value doesn't tell us anything positive or negative about fiat currency.

Re: Talent is everywhere, opportunity is not

#310
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Most of the people making those discoveries were people of means, though (or at least adjacent to, but not competing with, them).
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