Thank you for posting this. These are the kinds of comments that we need more of on the internet. Ones that aren’t afraid to push back on the errors of the hivemind, however justified the sentiment may be.

What is the unlikely scenario you’re referring to? As far as I can tell, his assessment of the situation is correct. I’m not sure why you’re so sure that the question was in bad faith.

Look I agree that these proceedings should move quickly to put Trump behind bars.

But… If I’m reading it correctly, that says that the accused has a right to a speedy trial, not the prosecution, which is what the above commenter asked for.

Understandable for GDP, but unemployment should be a factor you consider in measures of well-being. Employment is one of the most important factors in a person’s life path. Unemployed people run into more financial difficulties, is associated with health problems, and results in society wide effect like increased crime.

There may be other political parties but none of them have anywhere near the power of the CPC. They are all subordinate. For example, all election candidates must be approved by the CPC.

Also, the only direct elections in China are at the local level. At higher levels of government everything is chosen by local congresses. This results in a system where the people at the top are very removed from the votes of citizens.

Also, the national Congress largely exists to rubber-stamp whatever Xi Jinping wants. Any opposition would be swiftly stamped out.

China is effectively a dictatorship. It has one political party and Xi Jinping ended the two term limit so he could stay in power. What form of government would you say they have?

What makes it weird?

I believe we already do this to some extent. There are government funded grants for all kinds of things. I guess you just want more of that? I think you have to be careful, because that starts to look like the government picking a lot of winners and losers in private industry. Ripe for misallocation of resources.

The final summary of the article you linked:

“Using 105,950 observations from 32 different studies we find that CVC investments are performance enhancing, for both corporations and start-ups. Our results detect that time, country, and industry moderate the effects. Especially after the Dotcom bubble burst, high performance is detected. Similarly, the performance in the U.S. outreaches the performance of other countries. Due to the high risk of successfully developing a pharmaceutical drug, no statistically significant effect of CVC investments in the health care industry is observed. As expected, strategic performance outperforms financial impacts. Although there is good rationale for a clear strategic focus, the finding that CVC investment does not lead to stronger financial performance is surprising and urges practitioners to rethink their CVC objectives and approach”

Disregarding the fact that this is only looking at CVCs and not traditional VCs, I don’t think this really supports your argument that it is a dice roll at best. Seems to me like it is broadly beneficial with some caveats.

Do you have a source for the claim that VC funded companies would have been replaced by equivalent companies if VCs did not exist? I find that somewhat hard to believe.

I don’t have a good business idea, not everyone has to. That’s not even what we’re talking about.

VC is clearly not “a joke”. All you have to do is Google “major companies that took VC funding” to see the impact of it. Of course this leaves out the thousands of others that failed, but long term the winners are going to have a very positive impact on driving innovation.

You may say “those companies would have succeeded anyway” and maybe so, but I doubt it would have happened nearly as fast, if at all.

This comment doesn’t even pass the smell test.

If every company that took VC money failed, VCs wouldn’t make any money.

The reality is MOST VC investments fail, but the few who make it are home runs. This is how they make money. The risk/reward of your company was just not a favorable investment for them. Whether it’s because you went to an Ivy League or not is irrelevant.

Without VCs, many of those homeruns would never be able to get off the ground and the US economy would be significantly less dynamic

I don’t think you can really conclude that from the data.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

Okay but this isn’t what happens. When using services like instacart they will batch only maybe two or three orders in a car. Unless there are other services that I’m not aware of that will batch more?

I don’t think grocery translates well to mass delivery because it increases rates of spoilage and damaged produce.

A delivery huh? I wonder by what mode if transport that would be delivered…

Yes I think it’s very possible that if you were to graph a population’s Intelligence using a some empirical score, then it has a high probability to NOT look exactly like a normal distribution.

For example, let’s say that there was some score called “intelligence score” that scores people’s intelligence from 0-100. Do you think that if you were to graph a given population’s “intelligence score” that it would be EXACTLY centered around 50 in a Normal distribution? I think that’s unlikely. It’s more likely that there would be local maximums or minimums, or various skews in the graph. There could be a small peak at score 75, or a trough at 85. There could be all sorts of distributions.

And guess what? Given this hypothetical distribution, you could STILL draw lines somewhere on the graph showing quartiles. Those lines might not be at 25-50-75. They might not even be the same distance apart from each other. But you CAN draw them somewhere to split the scores. Just because a graph “has quartiles” does not mean it will always look like the OP.

Spendrill is not misunderstanding the OP. He’s just saying that if intelligence could be measured by a better metric, then distribution of that metric among the population would not look as smooth as the one in the OP.

Lol. People read your comment and think you didn’t understand the original post. When in reality they are the ones who didn’t understand your comment.

So you are upset that someone wrote a book about a *checks notes" President of the United States because he’s…too boring?

Seems to me that it’s more like you just wanted to talk about how you didn’t like him.