[secfirstmd]

Personally I just wish less of our world class minds were working at huge, de facto advertising companies thinking about how to monetise/track the flow of information, sneak an microsecond advantage on the stock market etc and more were solving more important stuff like climate change, disease and democracy/human rights being under retreat.

Lets be honest here, Whatsapp gathered hundreds of millions of users with a tiny team. Signal and Signal protocol made Whatsapp secure with less than 10 people on the team full time. So less than a hundred staff, 1.5 billion per year is more than enough resources to add get most of the benefits of Whatsapp to humanity. Leaving plenty of engineers, MBAs and who ever is left to go do more useful stuff.

[storgendibal]

I don't disagree. I think a lot of the debate on this thread comes down to free market economics and whether you believe it leads to a global maxima or not.

I think that starts to approach a religious belief, so I don't think I want to get into that debate, but I have yet to see a system that works better than the free-market (plus a reasonable safety net )

[ratacat]

Here's my favorite group of smart people working on solving climate change.

Http://regen.network