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Do you have a source for the claim that VC funded companies would have been replaced by equivalent companies if VCs did not exist?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

Okay but this isn’t what happens. When using services like instacart they will batch only maybe two or three orders in a car. Unless there are other services that I’m not aware of that will batch more?

I don’t think grocery translates well to mass delivery because it increases rates of spoilage and damaged produce.

A delivery huh? I wonder by what mode if transport that would be delivered…

Yes I think it’s very possible that if you were to graph a population’s Intelligence using a some empirical score, then it has a high probability to NOT look exactly like a normal distribution.

For example, let’s say that there was some score called “intelligence score” that scores people’s intelligence from 0-100. Do you think that if you were to graph a given population’s “intelligence score” that it would be EXACTLY centered around 50 in a Normal distribution? I think that’s unlikely. It’s more likely that there would be local maximums or minimums, or various skews in the graph. There could be a small peak at score 75, or a trough at 85. There could be all sorts of distributions.

And guess what? Given this hypothetical distribution, you could STILL draw lines somewhere on the graph showing quartiles. Those lines might not be at 25-50-75. They might not even be the same distance apart from each other. But you CAN draw them somewhere to split the scores. Just because a graph “has quartiles” does not mean it will always look like the OP.

Spendrill is not misunderstanding the OP. He’s just saying that if intelligence could be measured by a better metric, then distribution of that metric among the population would not look as smooth as the one in the OP.

Lol. People read your comment and think you didn’t understand the original post. When in reality they are the ones who didn’t understand your comment.

Are you serious? Look at that map. Those yellow areas are absolutely massive. It includes huge swathes of suburban areas, not “dense cities”. I mean look at Dallas, Atlanta, or SoCal in that pic. My point is that in those suburban areas most people are not within a reasonable walking distance of a grocery store.

Just because they’re centered around a major metro area doesn’t mean the people living there are close to one. I live in on of those cities in what someone would consider an “urban/suburban” area. For me to walk to my closest grocery store it would take me 30 minutes each way according to Google maps. That’s not reasonable. Keep in mind that you’ve got to actually carry the groceries on the way back. And I’m probably in a denser area than most.

EDIT: According to the USDA, americans are on average 2.2 miles from a SNAP authorized store. That’s a 45 minute walk each way. No Americans are not just “lazy” for not walking to the store. It just isn’t a reasonable think to do at all.

In the US fraternities and sororities are not usually financial assistance organizations as you’re describing. The main focus is just as a social organization. A quick and easy way to get 50 friends to hang out with. They also do sometimes provide connections or help with studying.

Also the EU is way less powerful over the individual EU countries than the US federal government is over the states.

Not so sure about this…maybe you could find two states that have very differing laws compared to France-Germany, but on the whole it’s probably not true. Kind of hard to quantify that though.

It differes based on the sport. The NFL is the most “equal” between teams. It’s nice because you don’t have the same teams winning year after year. The worst teams get the best picks in the next draft, so theoretically they should get a boost (although some teams still manage to screw it up). In baseball, and to a lesser extent basketball, the “big market” cities tend to dominate the sport. Which sucks when you’re rooting for a small market team that is always getting destroyed by the NY Yankees or the LA Dodgers.

I mean you don’t walk…

If you were to walk it could literally be an hour walk or more for some people.

“most Americans” don’t live in a city that dense and certainly drive to the store for groceries. But when I say “to the store” it’s not the same as what Europeans think. It’s not a little corner store where you get your groceries for the day. It’s a giant Walmart/Kroger where you load up for the whole week so you don’t have to go as often.

I don’t agree with your third point at all.

I don’t think I’ve met any Americans that use their ancestry as a sense of “self worth” in any meaningful amount. For the vast majority of people it’s just a interesting quirk people like to share about their ancestry. Taking that and criticizing it because “last time we did it, nazism happened” is quite a stretch.

Your description isn’t how it works in most places really. The “districts” aren’t usually that far apart. It would be common to find single family homes close by a school, or an apartment building right next to an office building.

Zoning is useful in scenarios like industrial vs residential buildings. You wouldn’t want to have an apartment building next to a railroad hub for example. The railroad would be very loud/dirty, and industrial business would benefit more from being closer to the rail hub.

I don’t think sarcastic comments like this help the opposing argument very much.