101–107 of 107 posts
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It's not a paywalled article. Turn cookies on and click the link again. If you have cookies off when you click the link it redirects to the login page.
You can't read it if you've already read 20 articles in the past month, either, thanks to evercookie.
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So diabetes should be the easiest one to attack.
How might it be attacked, from a medicinal perspective?
Also, artificial pancreases are in the trial stage.
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Profits would only go to zero if everybody was equally talented, equally educated, equally industrious, and equally lucky. Reality, of course, is quite different.
So you are saying that of you win the genetic lottery, you make profits?
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>#1 Bill Gates - had a million dollar trust fund from his bank president grandfather, mother on United Way board with president of IBM In what reality could the act of taking a million dollars and multiplying it by a factor of seventy six thousand be viewed as being "born into it"?
He worked very hard, it just came natural to him. If he was lower-class he would have never had access to early computers and it would be much less likely that he would have been successful at all. He was a natural leader, but you can't just start out as a CEO unless you have a product or service to offer. Bill Gates couldn't have had time to build his software if he had to work daily to put himself through school (t…
At the time you didn't have to be rich to be a computer enthusiast. Silicon Valley was full of average Joes who had breadboarded up a simple computer but couldn't figure out what to do with it. Gates may have had more trouble if his family was at the very bottom end of the income spectrum, but computer geekery was a middle class thing. Literally millions of people could have done the same.
>He was a natural leader, but you can't just start out as a CEO unless you have a product or service to offer.
That's just nonsense. Anybody can be a CEO - you just need to start a corporation. When Gates and Allen started Microsoft it was just the two of them. There was no product either. This is all on the wiki page, by the way.
>Bill Gates couldn't have had time to build his software if he had to work daily to put himself through school (to have access to the computer).
That might be true except that he dropped out of school as soon as the company was founded.
>Starting with a million dollars is no different than starting with 100 million, it all depends on how good the person is at spotting opportunity, learning from mistakes, and manipulating (not in a bad way) people to help you build your empire.
You don't need a million dollars to start a company, and lots of now-powerful companies were started with far less. Apple, for instance. If Gates was lucky it was because he came of age in a time where computers were changing so fast there were more opportunities for small, agile companies. But that was true of his entire generation.
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Think about what these uber-rich entrepreneurs would find sexy. Curing cancer, a condom people actually want to use, extending human life, saving the world from meteor impacts, bringing mammoths back, flying to space... It's all near-future, commercializable stuff. Next, go read some article titles/abstracts under quant-ph on arxiv and think about how many would of those would really grab these rich dudes by their ey…
'Why should we let people whose only qualification is money try to decide what's important?'. Let! Gosh, lovely implications. What constraints do you have in mind to fetter the lawful activities of very rich people? Who is the 'we' and how will you define 'important'? But it's the 'let' that worries me.
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>Profit has no space in "real" free markets. What kind of drivel is that? If you create a product/service which nobody else can duplicate and the demand for it is there, you are going to make a profit. That's exactly how a "real" free market functions.
why wouldn't someone be able to duplicate? You keep things secret? Government protects you via patents and copyright? I mean econ 101 is that markets bring profits towards zero. A perfect market with perfect information means zero profit. Any market that tends towards "perfection" would therefore be anathema to any capitalist. In other words, fuck man, capitalists hate markets. They would prefer that you don't have a…
Keeping secrets is only one option. Another is the cost to duplicate. Your myopic understanding of manufacturing processes likely cannot be alleviated in the comments section here, but just consider that the cost to build certain chip fab plants is up in the billions and takes years to build. Once the first entity builds that, it is guaranteed a profit for at least the number of years it takes to build a duplicate manufacturing process. This is true under any definition of a real free market, making your assertion false.
>In other words, fuck man, capitalists hate markets.
Nope, you mean incumbents hate markets. I think you need to revisit the definition of a capitalist. A real capitalist dreams of when they can come in with a better price/service/product and unseat the incumbents.