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While this is just a very basic idea I put out, still, corruption is rampant everywhere anyway. I suspect it would be a net positive to have a ton of Brilliant
by eaenki 7y ago
While this is just a very basic idea I put out, still, corruption is rampant everywhere anyway. I suspect it would be a net positive to have a ton of Brilliant students getting money for their projects even if half of the money are corrupted away.
- jjoonathan 7y agoYou can't satisfy corruption by throwing money at it and hoping it only takes its share. It won't. It will take it all, and then it will find a way to take more besides.
- eaenki 7y agoWell, a lot of the budget of any given government is corrupted away, regardless of what you put that into. But some inevitably goes to what it was meant to address. It won’t take it all, or no one would have any access to healthcare facilities and public transport. But we do.
- ta1234567890 7y agoSo what is the solution to corruption? It does seem like it's getting worse, or maybe media coverage about it is getting better. Has any country in the world successfully fought corruption in a peaceful way? (ie. no revolutions, no guillotines)
- buboard 7y agoMost of the west is not corrupt. You have to visit eastern europe, latin america, middle east and east asia to experience it The solution is not throwing more free money in public coffers. It definitively exacerbated corruption in greece for example
- ta1234567890 7y agoSo you are saying that free money is not a solution. Ok, then what is a solution? Also, how do you measure and compare corruption? The US has gone to war killing millions of people, including hundreds of thousands of their own, motivated by (oil/industrial-military) money and justified with lies. The US political system is controlled mostly by corporations and rich people that pay for lobbying. So are you saying the west is not corrupt because it is more publicly/"legally" corrupt?
- joyeuse6701 7y agoI do agree with the sentiment that via political donations the U.S. political system is corrupted, but I hope you can offer a citation for the millions killed and hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens, and a clear cause and effect of the stated motivation, please. I think most of what you said is an overstatement, not to belittle those that suffered because of greed.
- ta1234567890 7y agoYou are right, millions might be an exaggeration, I was going off of numbers read elsewhere online. Here's a source that estimates total deaths, post-9/11 so far (by November 2018) at hundreds of thousands: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2018/Human%20Costs%2C%20Nov%208%202018%20CoW.pdf https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/20... That doesn't take into account the previous war with Iraq. By the way, I never said US citizens. Do you think US citizens' lives are somehow more important than people from other parts of the world? Also, oil/greed seems to be the most apparent motivation (you might want to watch the movie Vice, or just revise non-US media coverage from the time). It would be great if you could provide a source that has a clear (real) cause/effect of whatever motivated the US to start a war with Iraq and Afghanistan, and please don't say weapons of mass destruction.
- joyeuse6701 7y agoI'm limiting it to U.S. citizens (soldiers) because I can with some confidence say that U.S. policy at least can be traced as a cause of their death. No, I don't think US citizen's lives are more important defacto, but I don't see all lives as equal either, for the record. Oil/greed fit the leftist narrative, but I'm not convinced, and since you made the claim that it's about oil and greed, the onus is on you to prove it! I don't have to provide motivation of my own, though I suspect two planes crashing into a building might have something to do with it.
- ta1234567890 7y ago
- damck 7y agoWhich west? The one that has legal corruption under name of lobbying? Or the west which has internally, without the need of pescy public's say, elected chair of governance?
- bsanr2 7y ago>Most of the west is not corrupt. That's laughable.
- easytiger 7y agoI suspect it another millenial fantasy much like basic income et al I suspect giving people with no life experience, exposure to failure or real life dynamics will end badly. The single digit number of success stories in limited domains aren't representative of any real meaning
- zzzcpan 7y agoGiving people money at minimum redistributes wealth, so it cannot possibly be any worse, than letting wealth concentrate.
- easytiger 7y agoIt's a slippery slope as to whom you disenfranchised to redistributed that cash: but it will inevitably be a large group of people in the middle, not the minority elite you sold the policy on. If some people can't accumulate something they can't do bigger things as creators or create bigger markets as consumers.
- TheOtherHobbes 7y agoYou won't disenfranchise anyone, because the investment will more than pay for itself. That's the point. It's just another form of seed funding for ambitious start-ups. And $30bn/yr is absolutely trivial compared to the opportunity costs of an economy geared more to financialisation and regressive wealth extraction than to productive engineering and invention.
- toasterlovin 7y agoCorruption is not rampant everywhere. And perhaps that gets at the root of why some places have functioning modern economies and others do not.
- eaenki 7y agoSwitzerland, Norway and who else exactly? Out of 100+ countries
- teddyh 7y agoFull list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
- eaenki 7y agoIt would have been faster if you just replied with “CA and NZ”, since those are the only other countries on that list, which btw, I’m skeptical of.
- toasterlovin 7y agoIn your quest to rattle of glib retorts, you have failed to bother even reading the list. There are about a dozen countries with similar levels of corruption as Switzerland, Sweden, Canada, and New Zealand. And then there’s a whole bunch of other countries that are pretty close.
- eaenki 7y agoYes I barely checked the index because the index I consider good from the UN doesn’t list them as the least corrupted ones. This is a perceived index. I’m pretty skeptical of Sweden, NZ and CA being corruption free. They don’t have anything exceptional to back it up anyway.
- 7y ago
- buboard 7y agoCortuption is one of the biggest differentiating factors between successful/unsuccessful countries