3 ms·

Did you miss the part about the $25,000? Best as I can tell from the TED website, that's the admission to twelve TED conferences. Or two to three years of stat

Did you miss the part about the $25,000? Best as I can tell from the TED website, that's the admission to twelve TED conferences. Or two to three years of state university tuition (depending on your home state). Or a very very large book collection. Or one hell of a lot of plane tickets to see the lectures that every "famous futurist" gives for free, or for a relatively modest conference fee, multiple times per year. (If they didn't give public talks all the time these people wouldn't be famous futurists! And I assure you that the more obscure futurists, toiling away in academia, are almost certainly available to chat with you at a personal one-on-one lunch for a lot less than $25,000, or even $2000.) But, you know, one of the side effects of population growth is that there's now more than one sucker born every minute. UPDATE: Someone else in the thread says TED costs $6000 for four days. So, only four TED conferences. Or something. If you have to ask you probably can't afford it. ;)

Retric 18y ago
I remember hearing an interview on NPR where a stamp collector calculated the cost of a stamp at ~30,000$ per time he actually looked at it in his vault. For you or me that might seem stupid, but once you have more income than you can reasonably spend in your lifetime numbers below a million stop being meaningful. Or as a factory worker in china might say you spent 7.50$ on a cup of coffee?
makaimc 18y ago
Whether or not the program is worth $25,000 is up to the market to decide, not just you. Basing the value of a program by arbitrarily declaring "that's just too much money for me!" does not address whether or not the program ultimately offers enough value to the actual students. That question will be resolved in time.
- sethg 18y ago
  If I walk by a roulette wheel and I see someone put $10,000 on black, I deduce that the person who laid down that money is an idiot. I realize that one can make sophisticated arguments about "risk preference" and the idea that the market sets a price for everything and so on, but at a certain point you just have to say that the emperor has no clothes.
revorad 18y ago
Or two rounds of YC funding? :-D
sethg 18y ago
Perhaps, in exchange for the $25K, you will learn how to convince our future robot overlords to upload your brain into one of the good mainframes.

Retric 18y ago

I remember hearing an interview on NPR where a stamp collector calculated the cost of a stamp at ~30,000$ per time he actually looked at it in his vault. For you or me that might seem stupid, but once you have more income than you can reasonably spend in your lifetime numbers below a million stop being meaningful. Or as a factory worker in china might say you spent 7.50$ on a cup of coffee?

makaimc 18y ago

Whether or not the program is worth $25,000 is up to the market to decide, not just you. Basing the value of a program by arbitrarily declaring "that's just too much money for me!" does not address whether or not the program ultimately offers enough value to the actual students. That question will be resolved in time.

sethg 18y ago
If I walk by a roulette wheel and I see someone put $10,000 on black, I deduce that the person who laid down that money is an idiot. I realize that one can make sophisticated arguments about "risk preference" and the idea that the market sets a price for everything and so on, but at a certain point you just have to say that the emperor has no clothes.

revorad 18y ago

Or two rounds of YC funding? :-D

sethg 18y ago

Perhaps, in exchange for the $25K, you will learn how to convince our future robot overlords to upload your brain into one of the good mainframes.