colins_pride's comments

The problem is not a financial one. Money is not the constraint. There are people with access to (for our purposes) unlimited sums, with good intentions, and a good track record at getting difficult things done, who have not made a meaningful dent in the problem.

The answer must lie in an approach nobody tries, which immediately eliminates throwing money at problems. It also means that it doesn't make sense to give money to an existing organization.

The problem is inherently informational. How many thousands of small villages have wells, but no access to clean water because some small, inexpensive part is broken? I've travelled extensively in the third world, and this is the situation in all too many places. The key is in knowing what is needed where, and what equipment and knowledge is required to redress the problem.

The right answer is some sort of mega-clearinghouse of such information; matching people who know what is needed where with people who are headed in that direction and can bring equipment and acquire the knowledge required to successfully deploy the equipment before they go.

Hint: if you have to change the law to protect an industry, the industry is a dinosaur. You are not really saving it, merely delaying the inevitable at great global expense. The proper course of action lies in that eastern technique known as letting go

I think it's because this is something that is very hard to stick with. After the physical adjustment, one has to be willing to organize one's life in a way consistent with this, and that is tough when everybody uses this other mode of sleep.

government bailouts, payroll taxes, immigration law, sales taxes, teachers unions, Social Security, eminent domain, death taxes, stadium deals, cab medallions, government pensions, whatever it is that the NSA does, Medicare, Amtrak, income taxes, city planning commissions, stock price lawsuits, mandatory government fees, property taxes, random police searches, wealth taxes, rent control, energy taxes, airport security, what the CIA does to people, mileage taxes, corrupt politicians with dirty money in the freezer keeping their jobs, sin taxes, wiretapping backbones, tax credits, alternative minimum tax, airport landing slots

My point is that there is a revealed preference at work here

Here, I come to learn. It is more like adventurous travel. I don't come here to learn specific things, although I'll frequently use searchyc to track something down.

In other words, it isn't that people here are different from people that I know personally in X and Y ways, it is that the nature of the interaction is fundamentally very different.

At least, that's the main thing I got from this:

http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html

If one takes serious measures to belong to that second group of startups which are not (necesarily) doomed to failure, then the really relevant question is: what is the success rate in this group? 25%? A third? A coin flip?

Of course there's also a non-trivial chance of belonging to the first group, but not acknowledging or being aware of it.

So with all of that in mind, it would be really interesting to see an update to the conclusions from http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html

There are a few problems with this approach, though. One is that there is a real risk of split pots, where multiple winners drive the ex post probabilistic payoffs negative.

The larger issue is operational hurdles: it is tough to buy a million tickets, even if one has the coin. The retailers simply aren't setup to handle that sort of flow, and the state lottery officials have setup measures to prevent this sort of things (mostly as a result of being picked off in the past). To them, it is a business, they expect to make money, and they just change the rules relating to ticket sale mechanics to limit/punish outlets that collaborate with the syndicates.