[jongjong]

I think gmuslera is right to point out that being the first doesn't really matter (for most people). You also need support from the right kinds of people and it's not a given that being first and eventually being 'proven right' (which is itself highly subjective and contested) translates to the right kinds of people automatically gravitating to your idea and helping you to make a living out of it. There are many great innovations which stayed in the shadows long after the death of their creators. Many were never given due credit.

Humans fundamentally haven't changed since the time of Galileo or Socrates. Being too early tends to be a bad thing.

It's incredibly difficult to come up with an idea which is both new and not controversial. But nowadays, it is essential, probably more so than at any other time in history. All new ideas must fit precisely within established financial incentive structures. The degree of alignment required, the amount of boxes which must be ticked, is huge.

[Animats]

> It's incredibly difficult to come up with an idea which is both new and not controversial. But nowadays, it is essential, probably more so than at any other time in history. All new ideas must fit precisely within established financial incentive structures. The degree of alignment required, the amount of boxes which must be ticked, is huge.

That's a real issue. In the US today, you have to get to a minimum viable product early and find someone to throw money at it to make it scale fast. Things that take years to make work at all are hard to fund, even at a modest level. Xerography and color TV are technologies that took decades to make work at all.

This is partly the effect of a weakened patent system.

[10000truths]

One of the important functions of a government is to act as a backstop for capital-intensive investments with long-term ROIs. The interstate highway system started as Eisenhower's proposal, GPS and the moon mission were funded to one-up the Soviets, Arpanet/Internet was a DoD brainchild, and so on. All of that was enabled by Congresspeople who were willing to carve out a good chunk of the federal budget for large-scale, high-risk, long-tail-reward projects. That sort of thinking has not existed in Congress for some time (least of all during the current "starve the NSF" administration).

[Animats]

That's what favorable tax treatment of long term capital gains is supposed to be for. But that's not what that tax treatment is used for.

It shouldn't require socialism to get anything long term done.

[10000truths]

> That's what favorable tax treatment of long term capital gains is supposed to be for. But that's not what that tax treatment is used for.

The minimum duration for that qualification is one year. One year is nowhere near "long term" for a public works project. The Columbia shuttle took almost a decade to build. The interstate highway system took over three decades (and requires costly and ongoing maintenance).

> It shouldn't require socialism to get anything long term done.

What it ultimately requires is a trifecta of power (to fund the thing), vision (to plan the thing) and longevity (to see the thing through). Those three requirements could be satisfied by a government body or by a munificent billionaire, but democratically-minded people tend to put more faith in the former than in the latter.