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> Over the past two centuries, billions of humans have been lifted out of poverty > by entrepreneurs seeking great fortunes No. It was technological innovatio

> Over the past two centuries, billions of humans have been lifted out of poverty > by entrepreneurs seeking great fortunes No. It was technological innovation, made by the brightest heads of our species that did science themselves or at publicly funded institutions. The private sector took these innovations to manufacture and accumulate, while the innovators were criminally underpaid.

dcolkitt 5y ago
Honest question: have you ever successfully created and released a new product? Innovation isolated in a lab is all well and good, but ultimately does nothing to directly improve lives. It's only the first step in a long journey. Now you need to figure out how do scale up production? How do we control costs to keep it affordable to the average person? How do we get people aware of the product? Who do we target as early adopters? How do we incorporate feedback from real usage back into the engineering of the product? How do we design the product so it's intuitive and appealing to use? How can we convince investors to take the risk and give us the capital needed to get this process under way? How do we plan and budget for production to accommodate projected growth? Are there legal or regulatory considerations? How do we coordinate all the people that need to work together to make this happen? Ask anyone who's actually successfully launched a product how far the gap is between "works in a lab" to "widespread distribution and adoption". Engineers are part of the equation, but they often arrogantly assume they're the only ones that matter. That's why there's no such thing as a company that's only engineers. Entrepreneurs are the ones responsible for coordinating all the complex work that needs to come together to actually get a product into the hands of consumers.
- protoman3000 5y ago
  > Now you need to figure out how do scale up production? How do we control costs to keep it affordable to the average person? How do we get people aware of the product? Who do we target as early adopters? How do we incorporate feedback from real usage back into the engineering of the product? How do we design the product so it's intuitive and appealing to use? How can we convince investors to take the risk and give us the capital needed to get this process under way? How do we plan and budget for production to accommodate projected growth? Are there legal or regulatory considerations? How do we coordinate all the people that need to work together to make this happen? These are all valid questions whose answers are necessary, but ultimately they are solved problems for which we often can just copy the solution from previous iterations. Somebody just needs to do it and I don’t see why these persons should get far far more than the lions share. Let them get remunerated and also substantially, but not the most. The vast majority of entrepreneurs does not deserve renumerations of such high proportions, they just get them because they can. Past accumulation, capital structures, capital dependency, path dependencies - which ultimately are all just positions of power - allow the entrepreneur class to squeeze out such high returns. But they’re not even the root of the problem, because they are squeezed out by the financial class who has the privilege of squeezing others out by virtue of having squeezed out others before. We have these systems of hierarchical exploitation and accumulation for thousands of years, but saw only real improvement with technological innovation.

dcolkitt 5y ago

Honest question: have you ever successfully created and released a new product? Innovation isolated in a lab is all well and good, but ultimately does nothing to directly improve lives. It's only the first step in a long journey. Now you need to figure out how do scale up production? How do we control costs to keep it affordable to the average person? How do we get people aware of the product? Who do we target as early adopters? How do we incorporate feedback from real usage back into the engineering of the product? How do we design the product so it's intuitive and appealing to use? How can we convince investors to take the risk and give us the capital needed to get this process under way? How do we plan and budget for production to accommodate projected growth? Are there legal or regulatory considerations? How do we coordinate all the people that need to work together to make this happen? Ask anyone who's actually successfully launched a product how far the gap is between "works in a lab" to "widespread distribution and adoption". Engineers are part of the equation, but they often arrogantly assume they're the only ones that matter. That's why there's no such thing as a company that's only engineers. Entrepreneurs are the ones responsible for coordinating all the complex work that needs to come together to actually get a product into the hands of consumers.

protoman3000 5y ago
> Now you need to figure out how do scale up production? How do we control costs to keep it affordable to the average person? How do we get people aware of the product? Who do we target as early adopters? How do we incorporate feedback from real usage back into the engineering of the product? How do we design the product so it's intuitive and appealing to use? How can we convince investors to take the risk and give us the capital needed to get this process under way? How do we plan and budget for production to accommodate projected growth? Are there legal or regulatory considerations? How do we coordinate all the people that need to work together to make this happen? These are all valid questions whose answers are necessary, but ultimately they are solved problems for which we often can just copy the solution from previous iterations. Somebody just needs to do it and I don’t see why these persons should get far far more than the lions share. Let them get remunerated and also substantially, but not the most. The vast majority of entrepreneurs does not deserve renumerations of such high proportions, they just get them because they can. Past accumulation, capital structures, capital dependency, path dependencies - which ultimately are all just positions of power - allow the entrepreneur class to squeeze out such high returns. But they’re not even the root of the problem, because they are squeezed out by the financial class who has the privilege of squeezing others out by virtue of having squeezed out others before. We have these systems of hierarchical exploitation and accumulation for thousands of years, but saw only real improvement with technological innovation.