Thank you for posting this. These are the kinds of comments that we need more of on the internet. Ones that aren’t afraid to push back on the errors of the hivemind, however justified the sentiment may be.

What is the unlikely scenario you’re referring to? As far as I can tell, his assessment of the situation is correct. I’m not sure why you’re so sure that the question was in bad faith.

See I don’t buy into this. To me, this is getting into seriously conspiracy theory stuff. I don’t think that there is some grand plan to keep people stupid so that they don’t cause trouble.

I think the system just fails at educating students well due to a variety of factors.

This is interesting to me though. Didn’t most people (at least in developed countries) take tests in school? Get grades? I would think if you did below average on those you kind of…should know that you’re in the bottom half?

I get that it’s possible to make changes after schooling, and grades are only somewhat reliable (in that they also rely on effort) but still.

There may be other political parties but none of them have anywhere near the power of the CPC. They are all subordinate. For example, all election candidates must be approved by the CPC.

Also, the only direct elections in China are at the local level. At higher levels of government everything is chosen by local congresses. This results in a system where the people at the top are very removed from the votes of citizens.

Also, the national Congress largely exists to rubber-stamp whatever Xi Jinping wants. Any opposition would be swiftly stamped out.

China is effectively a dictatorship. It has one political party and Xi Jinping ended the two term limit so he could stay in power. What form of government would you say they have?

What makes it weird?

I believe we already do this to some extent. There are government funded grants for all kinds of things. I guess you just want more of that? I think you have to be careful, because that starts to look like the government picking a lot of winners and losers in private industry. Ripe for misallocation of resources.

The final summary of the article you linked:

“Using 105,950 observations from 32 different studies we find that CVC investments are performance enhancing, for both corporations and start-ups. Our results detect that time, country, and industry moderate the effects. Especially after the Dotcom bubble burst, high performance is detected. Similarly, the performance in the U.S. outreaches the performance of other countries. Due to the high risk of successfully developing a pharmaceutical drug, no statistically significant effect of CVC investments in the health care industry is observed. As expected, strategic performance outperforms financial impacts. Although there is good rationale for a clear strategic focus, the finding that CVC investment does not lead to stronger financial performance is surprising and urges practitioners to rethink their CVC objectives and approach”

Disregarding the fact that this is only looking at CVCs and not traditional VCs, I don’t think this really supports your argument that it is a dice roll at best. Seems to me like it is broadly beneficial with some caveats.

Do you have a source for the claim that VC funded companies would have been replaced by equivalent companies if VCs did not exist? I find that somewhat hard to believe.

I don’t have a good business idea, not everyone has to. That’s not even what we’re talking about.

VC is clearly not “a joke”. All you have to do is Google “major companies that took VC funding” to see the impact of it. Of course this leaves out the thousands of others that failed, but long term the winners are going to have a very positive impact on driving innovation.

You may say “those companies would have succeeded anyway” and maybe so, but I doubt it would have happened nearly as fast, if at all.

This comment doesn’t even pass the smell test.

If every company that took VC money failed, VCs wouldn’t make any money.

The reality is MOST VC investments fail, but the few who make it are home runs. This is how they make money. The risk/reward of your company was just not a favorable investment for them. Whether it’s because you went to an Ivy League or not is irrelevant.

Without VCs, many of those homeruns would never be able to get off the ground and the US economy would be significantly less dynamic

I don’t think you can really conclude that from the data.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

I’m not sure I understand. Does war declaration being a state action require recognition the state of Palestine? Or can they declare war on “Hamas” or any other entity/group of people. Or do they even have to state who they are at war against? Can they just say “we are at war”?

So you are upset that someone wrote a book about a *checks notes" President of the United States because he’s…too boring?

Seems to me that it’s more like you just wanted to talk about how you didn’t like him.

I have had this one time when I was very little. Around 6 or 7 years old or so, but I remember it very clearly. For me, it was like a gunshot went off right next to my head only a couple minutes after I fell asleep. I remember jolting awake and asking my brother and mother what it was, but they had no idea what I was talking about. Maybe some people have different experiences, but mine couldn’t be mistaken for a UFO sound.

Yeah this is not an unpopular opinion, especially on a site like this.

I don’t understand how this relates to the problem. Yes 50 percent is greater than 33 percent, but that’s not what the Monty hall problem is about. The point of the exercise is to show that when the game show host knowingly (and it is important to state that the host knows where the prize is) opens a door, he is giving the contestant 33 percent extra odds.