[yterdy]

>On the second point, the elephant in the room is that smart people in the US can make 2-3X as much in software or finance as they can in manufacturing, so what do you think they're going to pick? Which company is private investment going to fund - the SaaS co. with 40% margins and rapid growth or the manufacturing co. scraping 10% margins and 5% CAGR?

Ooh, this one's easy. Make software companies give back some of the money they make data-brokering and administering platforms where the vast majority of the advertiser-attracting content is provided, for free, by users. That's where the margin is coming from: users being scammed out of the true value of their contributions. Tax or regulation, pick your poison.

Someone brought up Tesla and SpaceX in another reply. The Tesla whose market share growth was driven largely by EV tax incentives, of course. The SpaceX that built heavily on gifted NASA research and expertise, of course.

[chii]

> users being scammed out of the true value of their contributions

is it a scam? Or are the users willingly trade their data for features?

> The SpaceX that built heavily on gifted NASA research and expertise

i think you're discounting their own hardwork. NASA research is available to any other company - it isn't an exclusive transfer.

[yterdy]

>is it a scam?

Is it a scam if I buy a $1 million painting off you for $50, knowing that I'm aware of its value and that you aren't? It's at best unfair and disingenuous. But what's more important to consider is how the scale of this imbalance has warped our economy: as mentioned above, a large portion of our most educated workers are getting paid to build addictive social media platforms instead of things that are useful and sellable, because tech companies are capitalizing on an arbitrage opportunity that is so massive as to probably be unfair, if not criminal, somehow.

>NASA research is available to any other company

But not NASA grants and personnel contacts.