211–217 of 217 posts
I made lemonade from the lemons: came out of an MIT postdoc with a Science paper, the academic track didn't pan out (2 application cycles) but I saw that there was a need for a great online organic chemistry resource, so I started building one. 4 years in, it's self-supporting, and I have many of the advantages of an instructor with very little of the red tape I'd be experiencing if I were teaching in academia. Miss…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah this was a traditional scholarship with research funding inclusive. It was difficult to turn down because of that NYU and other private universities (Saas-fae etc.) will charge PhD candidates because they can. They have prestige, more applicants than they can deal with and the whole snob-appeal. I was going to join their Media Studies/Computer Science department
Ahhh, that is a tough situation. Oh, there it is, I completely forgot they are a private university. Well, best of luck with where you're at now!
It sounds super idealistic, but nowadays I think the only way to get real research out is to leave academia... which is why I decided to form a startup with my research partner. We aren't really into the whole get-acquired!money thing, it's more like; non-profits rarely work because people don't listen, using productizing techniques spreads ideas faster and research funding is dwindling. In the offer I was given, I was lucky to be fully funded but all the work I did would belong to NYU/Intel....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the size of the atmospheric gas industry? What's the size of the global food industry? To a rough approximation: everyone who eats must pay for food (at least some of it). To a rough approximation: nobody who breathes pays for oxygen. I'm not saying there's no market at all for oxygen, nitrogen, CO2, etc. But that the vast amount of use for these gases is done without the mediation of a market, or the impositi…
Regardless of whether or not most people spend money to breathe oxygen, any approximation that loses a 9.5 billion dollar industry to rounding errors is a poor approximation. And while most people don't pay for their use of atmospheric gasses, those who do are paying for something mission critical. You might as well say there is no value to sunlight because I can go lay on my roof deck.
You're being obtusely blind to my point. It is a rounding error. Those who do pay (and, incidentally, with the reliance of most ag on industrial nitrogen fixation, that's probably pretty much all of us, indirectly) are doing so because the need they have cannot be met through the nontransactional atmospheric supply.
What you're missing with your fixation on the atmospheric gasses bit is the remainder of total economic output ($70 trillion, give or take rounding errors of a few trillion), every last dollar of which requires humans, animals, plants, factories, fires, and god knows what else to have access to an atmosphere. Your $9.5 billion? 0.013% of the total.
Again: air has, to any reasonable approximation, zero economic value. It has tremendous utility value.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the size of the atmospheric gas industry? What's the size of the global food industry? To a rough approximation: everyone who eats must pay for food (at least some of it). To a rough approximation: nobody who breathes pays for oxygen. I'm not saying there's no market at all for oxygen, nitrogen, CO2, etc. But that the vast amount of use for these gases is done without the mediation of a market, or the impositi…
Regardless of whether or not most people spend money to breathe oxygen, any approximation that loses a 9.5 billion dollar industry to rounding errors is a poor approximation. And while most people don't pay for their use of atmospheric gasses, those who do are paying for something mission critical. You might as well say there is no value to sunlight because I can go lay on my roof deck.
You're being obtusely blind to my point. It is a rounding error. Those who do pay (and, incidentally, with the reliance of most ag on industrial nitrogen fixation, that's probably pretty much all of us, indirectly) are doing so because the need they have cannot be met through the nontransactional atmospheric supply.
What you're missing with your fixation on the atmospheric gasses bit is the remainder of total economic output ($70 trillion, give or take rounding errors of a few trillion), every last dollar of which requires humans, animals, plants, factories, fires, and god knows what else to have access to an atmosphere. Your $9.5 billion? 0.013% of the total.
Again: air has, to any reasonable approximation, zero economic value. It has tremendous utility value.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's the size of the atmospheric gas industry? What's the size of the global food industry? To a rough approximation: everyone who eats must pay for food (at least some of it). To a rough approximation: nobody who breathes pays for oxygen. I'm not saying there's no market at all for oxygen, nitrogen, CO2, etc. But that the vast amount of use for these gases is done without the mediation of a market, or the impositi…
Regardless of whether or not most people spend money to breathe oxygen, any approximation that loses a 9.5 billion dollar industry to rounding errors is a poor approximation. And while most people don't pay for their use of atmospheric gasses, those who do are paying for something mission critical. You might as well say there is no value to sunlight because I can go lay on my roof deck.
You're being obtusely blind to my point. It is a rounding error. Those who do pay (and, incidentally, with the reliance of most ag on industrial nitrogen fixation, that's probably pretty much all of us, indirectly) are doing so because the need they have cannot be met through the nontransactional atmospheric supply.
What you're missing with your fixation on the atmospheric gasses bit is the remainder of total economic output ($70 trillion, give or take rounding errors of a few trillion), every last dollar of which requires humans, animals, plants, factories, fires, and god knows what else to have access to an atmosphere. Your $9.5 billion? 0.013% of the total.
Again: air has, to any reasonable approximation, zero economic value. It has tremendous utility value.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regardless of whether or not most people spend money to breathe oxygen, any approximation that loses a 9.5 billion dollar industry to rounding errors is a poor approximation. And while most people don't pay for their use of atmospheric gasses, those who do are paying for something mission critical. You might as well say there is no value to sunlight because I can go lay on my roof deck.
rounding errors You're being obtusely blind to my point. It is a rounding error. Those who do pay (and, incidentally, with the reliance of most ag on industrial nitrogen fixation, that's probably pretty much all of us, indirectly) are doing so because the need they have cannot be met through the nontransactional atmospheric supply . What you're missing with your fixation on the atmospheric gasses bit is the remainder…
Apparently, its not possible to leave academia unless you write a detailed blog post about it.