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Originally Posted by Lamplighter
I stopped reading the link, and LOL'ed when I read his complaint about
hedge funds making huge profits based microsecond-trading
of minute (tiny) stock price differences (e.g., Chicago vs New York exchanges).
But what does his "truly novel invention" do ?
... it proposes to get a few people to their destination some minute (time) quicker.
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You obviously don't understand what Hyperloop is, or the tremendous impact it would have on the environment, energy savings, and (maybe) safety. But as I said at the outset, it isn't about Instagram or Hyperloop, they are just the extreme ends of the spectrum.
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He is really only talking about how to gamble $ on the stock exchanges,
not inventions that have serious, life-changing, implications.
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Since you didn't read the article, you didn't get the point that investment funds don't want to fund live changing anything, they want to make the most money with the least risk. That's logical and practical but doesn't spur or assist invention.
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Google and MicroSoft being the best examples of corporations that have/are changing missions, and will probably suffer under the investor (aka gambling) pressures of Wall Street.
What is ironic here is that Google just won it's multi-year court battle to scan all printed books ... to create a database allowing anyone to search for anything... based not on copyright law, but on the concept of providing a service for the "good of the public".
This is diametrically opposed to the current concept of investors in the digital world.
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This is true.
I'm not sure Google's goal is completely altruistic, but it's a tremendous service to researchers and thesis writers everywhere.