Reginald strikes again!
But the real question is why a mind as bright as Reg is doing biz dev at a services company in Toronto? Shouldn't he be saving the world?
Why the Fuck?
41–50 of 528 posts
Re: Why the Fuck?
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Generally their bank accounts.
There are pretty good ways to make a good deal more money more predictably than working at Google or playing the startup lottery...
I wasn't saying that any given programmer was the best mind of their generation - just that many of the best minds of these recent generations have been programmers, or involved in technology development in some manner.
And what are some of the "pretty good ways to make a good deal more money more predictably" that you're referencing?
Re: Why the Fuck?
#43It appears that Diabetes research receives over a billion in funding each year just from the NIH [1][2]. As far as I can tell this doesn't include private funding for cures/treatments. Maybe I'm misinterpreting the data here, but it looks like many people and many millions of dollars are devoted to solving real world problems like the one Scott Hanselman has. [1] General Disease research numbers http://report.nih.gov…
Diabetes has a variety of causes. Concentrating on just one cause - too much sugar in the diet - how much money is spent by producers of sugar on, for example, advertising each year?
How much is paid by those producers of sugar in tax, and how much of that tax is used for research?
I agree with your general point though.
Re: Why the Fuck?
#44To launch a Facebook clone you sign up for Heroku or AWS, push some Rails code, and start promoting yourself. To launch a medical device you spend years cutting through regulation and red tape, negotiating with and marketing to an industry that is probably threatened by your existence and will do its best to stop you. Screw up at Facebook, you get yelled at on Twitter and your share price dips for a few days. Screw u…
> Screw up a medical device, you get sued out of existence.
Or, you know, people die.
Re: Why the Fuck?
#45Diabetes isn't a problem that we need technology to solve. Sure it could help, but that's treating the symptom, when what we really need to do is use preventative care to treat the root of the problem - corn subsidies and education.
Re: Why the Fuck?
#46Individuals are motivated by different sets of wants and needs. Financial security just happens to be damned near at the top of the list.
Re: Why the Fuck?
#47Bad incentives. Maybe smart people don't care about money all that much, but they want their lives to not suck, their effort to not feel wasted, their identity not wrapped up in the service of dysfunction and politics. There are not many places where you can better humanity for a living and live the life such a person deserves, and it is not the job of humans to sacrifice themselves for no reward. That's why people w…
Is there any indication that education needs geniuses? Does it substantially improve innovation? When America was world dominant in innovation, were its geniuses in academia, or industry?
Re: Why the Fuck?
#48If you knew the difficulty/incentive trade-off involved in making sugar management easier relative to that involved in getting people to click on ads, you wouldn't ask this question.
If web application developers had to jump through the same hoops that medical device developers did we'd all still be using AltaVista.
Re: Why the Fuck?
#49Why people gotta judge? Lead by example, or shut the fuck up (statement made by the excessive fucks in the article). Ignore what others do and do what you believe.
Re: Why the Fuck?
#50Raganwald,
Have you considered asking yourself this question? You "take the friction out of writing and selling books." You could start with yourself and helping with Diabetes.