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by robertlagrant 1286 days ago
Progress doesn't come from funding, and funding doesn't come from the government. People make progress. People pay taxes.
2 comments

Sure progress comes from scientists , not from idiots building b2b saas apps.
> Sure progress comes from scientists , not from idiots building b2b saas apps.

Progress comes from all sorts of places. Scientific progress come from scientists. That doesn't result in things better in my life without a huge number of other people doing things well and efficiently. Both of which includes anything people will pay for, including b2b saas apps. Try having a pandemic lockdown without Amazon-level fulfillment in place. Thankfully we didn't have to.

No not all work is equal. Progress is a rare thing. Do not equate all forms of work to progress. People will pay good money for women to fart on their faces. That's not valuable work. Neither is building shitty apps.
Scientist's work is not necessarily valuable either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Nobel_Prize

Who would you like to appoint as an arbiter for what "valuable work is"? If certain people enjoy and pay women to fart in their faces - would you like to ban that? How about other "useless" activities that humans enjoy like video games or massages or fashion or fancy restaurants - would you like to ban those as well?

Who's saying anything needs to be banned. We're talking about who can reasonably claim to be contributing to the progress of society. Go ahead and smell the farts my friend
I'm not equating all forms of work to progress. That'd be a category error. It's the inverse: you saying only progress comes from scientists is a category error.
> Do not equate all forms of work to progress. People will pay good money for women to fart on their faces.

Depends entirely upon the quality of the fart.

But what about the yet another distributed key store we built?
I feel like you're making fun of Riak :)
Corporations seem to do a good job of avoiding taxes in a way that people cannot replicate. The ultra-rich founders also do a great job of making sure they pay a lower tax rate than the rest of us.

I think Keynes said "The worst form of capitalism is in which the public holds all the risk, and the private sector realizes all the rewards".

> Corporations seem to do a good job of avoiding taxes in a way that people cannot replicate. The ultra-rich founders also do a great job of making sure they pay a lower tax rate than the rest of us.

Focusing on the latter is fair enough. Thinking that a corporation having lots of money is bad seems completely pointless. That money ends up as dividends or higher salaries or lower prices. Tax the first two and celebrate all three.