[IG_Semmelweiss]

The endgame for any living being is maximize return for as minimal effort.

This is not true for just "unregulated markets".

Regulated markets operate the same way, see: Banks. Credit Cards. Healthcare insurance by state.

But that's why we have laws specifically to break up anticompetitive behavior. The problem is they are not properly written and leave a lot up to discretion.

[lostlogin]

> The endgame for any living being is maximize return for as minimal effort.

I’m a cynical person but this is way beyond what I think. You don’t have to go far to see counter examples where someone has done something pretty great for which they get little return but spent a lot of effort. Skimming the front page on HN today has some examples.

The examples I found: the WLED link, the large format camera blog post and the thing about Tolkien.

[jancsika]

> The endgame for any living being is maximize return for as minimal effort.

Sure, OG hackers don't want to waste 30 seconds walking to the printer if their print job isn't ready.

But OG hackers solve that problem by spending three hundred million seconds writing an entire OS from scratch.

And in the end, I'm not even sure if that solved the original problem.

Of course you wouldn't be wrong by seven orders of magnitude in the more common cases. But I strongly doubt that Haiku, the Quine that works in dozens of languages at once, or Gnome 2 started their work to fatten up for the coming winter months.