If you want a one-time fix, there's a case of an old guy who fell into coal fire and regrew his hair :)
74 karma · joined October 10, 2018
On top of that, US gov has all kinds of laws and regulations that make it difficult to do certain valuable things. For example, if companies in the same industry come together to do something valuable, they might break antitrust laws. Government might also make it prohibitively expensive to do something and then they step in to do it themselves - you see it with pharma research.
It shows that corporations themselves are engaged in a planned economy. It's not just American thing, but it's the way things work.
Paul Graham in his essay http://www.paulgraham.com/opensource.html also calls corporations "communist states".
Price has nothing to do with a vague concept of 'value'.
"Masks Don't Work: A review of science relevant to COVID-19 social policy"
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340570735_Masks_Don...
My point is that SEMATECH shows you can have a voluntary consortium where different parties fund an organization and then collectively benefit from it.
Government does that, but on a more general level and it's not based on voluntary interaction (you must pay taxes, otherwise if you resist arrest you will be murdered).
I'm responding to people who complain how companies are ripping the public off, when in reality it's the government that takes almost half of GDP in developed nations.
If the government took less in taxes, then companies would have more left over to fund a voluntary consortium which would do similar things that NIH and NSF do.
Pharma companies are profiting off of your tax dollars
Another way to do it would be to form a consortium like SEMATECH [1].
If the government didn't tax and regulate companies and people so highly they would have more left over to join voluntary associations and do the same thing.
It’s the handful of people who control 90% of all wealth.
This is the setup you're in with the government. Wealthy people pay most of the taxes and support the government system. Tiny percentage of their confiscated wealth was apparently used to create the internet. Government was simply a middleman just like they are a middleman between people and construction companies when it comes to building roads.
People could have come together to create a non-profit that would do some basic research into various things. They could've pooled their money and paid for it collectively. However, you are already taxed, so why not use those funds to create an agency inside the government and do the same thing?
"If Bill Gates had been born and raised in Ruanda, you wouldn't know his name today."
There are wealthy people outside of the USA and those who weren't born wealthy.
It's a mistake to claim that differences in wealth (or height or IQ) can be explained by environmental factors.
Uber, on the other hand, delivers physical services to consumers that cost money and they do not have economies of scale or other innovations (e.g. self-driving vehicles) which would help them lower price.
Retailers can use economies of scale to lower prices and increase variety of products. There are no economies of scale in Uber the way it's structured now and the service is largely homogeneous. There could be economies of scale with self-driving cars, but why should they be the winner there?
The only way they managed to offer lower prices (which is the main concern to riders) is through VC subsidy. There is simply no way to significantly lower prices for taxis, unless you have self-driving cars.
The only thing Uber has is a limited power of a local network effect which is a relatively weak moat.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/04/hubert-horan-can-uber-ever-deliver-part-nineteen-ubers-ipo-prospectus-overstates-its-2018-profit-improvement-by-5-billion.htmlThere are direct debit schemes that are widely used.