Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? • Hacker News Board

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#211

Post by didericis » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 7:00 AM UTC

Polylactic_acid wrote: post #205

didericis wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly there’s at least one major discovery waiting for someone: how to jump those hurdles

Its not a discovery. Its just being highly influential in the organization and actually wanting something to be done when it isn't profitable/would reduce your budget for the future.

Gaining that influence is a different type of problem than what was being discussed, yes. But health care has a huge set of competing political forces influencing it, and the key to figuring out how to untangle them effectively is to approach things systematically and creatively, just like with any other problem. The problem shouldn't be dismissed as a candidate for systematic examination or given less credence than other types of problems just because it's a political one; we have yet to discover how to build health care organizations that untangle those forces effectively.

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#212

Post by kd5bjo » Sat, Apr 25, 2020, 5:35 PM UTC

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #201

pacala wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That end is incredibly sad. We still have to pay our mortgage and our dentists, but can't ask for a fair pay for our highly skilled work. I guess we deserve the ad-based monetization model that has taken over the world. Brave new world, let's shill for megacorps with all the clickbait we can possibly muster.

This is a misunderstanding of my goal. Even if we share everything we can there is always novel work someone needs done, and we can get paid to do it. But also if we share everything we can then most of life will become much cheaper. My end goal is to reduce the marginal cost of living to near zero and then arrange society to provide for everyone. In that case you wouldn’t need to pay the dentist or the mortgage. But…

> But also if we share everything we can then most of life will become much cheaper.

This is an extraordinary claim that demands actual evidence. Eliminating IP costs might make things cheaper, but physical goods (like food) will still need material, energy, and labor inputs to produce for the forseeable future. How do you plan to bring these costs down to “near zero”?

If you want economists to study this, you’ll need to convince them it’s plausible. That requires at least some back-of-the-envelope reasoning from data that already exists, even if it’s not a perfect example of the policies you’re advocating. There are records from times & places where IP law was either nonexistent or unenforced; what do they say about your theories? If you expect things to be different this time, what leads you to think that (with specifics)?

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#213

Post by mikhailfranco » Tue, Apr 28, 2020, 4:19 AM UTC

appleshore wrote: post #25

xiphias2 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money (in the form of buying power) can't be created from nothing, so whenever a bad idea/execution is funded, it takes away buying power from companies that have better execution, but less access to cheap loans. As an example I personally know a CEO who had a great idea, great exececution, but a new competitor startup was funded with millions of dollars of cash that threatened to sue him in the US. He didn't have mo…

Interesting concept. Perhaps we can name this the Swordfish Law: cheap money drives out good ideas.

This is well known in the Austrian School. It's not that cheap money drives out good ideas, but it dilutes them, because cheap money allows bad ideas to persist - there is no Schumpeterian creative destruction.

The corollary is that average productivity declines, because inefficient zombie companies are still encouraged to walk the earth, which is exactly what we have seen since the GFC triggered money printing and artificially low interest rates. Of course, non-Austrian economists are perplexed, and create many spurious explanations, which is an ironic example of the ineffectiveness of (economic) research.

[The US legal system is a separate issue of rent seeking by an entrenched lobby, which creates and preserves laws and legal frameworks that reward litigation. US healthcare is another anomalous parasitic example. Other countries do not have these problems to the same extent, but they often have other types of rent seeking, bureaucracy, inefficiency and corruption to compensate.]

Re: Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?

#214

Post by pojzon » Thu, May 07, 2020, 4:43 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #202

pojzon wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot of shallow talking in what you said because things are not black/white. And yes I can change the company I work for also reducing workdays amount but that will directly make my life unsustainable and I dont have an option to buy 50 morgs of field to start a farm (this costs around few million dollars where I live) and thats the area lords were giving to their peasents.. So yea your argument is: - “just…

Resorting to insults when you dont have arguments is kind of weak technique. The problem with underperforming agriculture and lack of nutrition was persistent in that system. You seem to assume that peasants under serfdom had easy low work access to food and everything. That is not the case. The land does not produce food for whole year without you working it a lot. Peasants in serfdom had hard time to produce enough…

You still completely missed the point again, which convinces me this discussion has no sense. We were not discussing the live conditions back then and now but how much you had to work for your land lord vs for yourself. Disparity is huge... and its just stupid to deny that...