Is your friend Nathan Anderson?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Anderson

How is this different from an investment in, say, BioNTech?

In other words, if this single product the company is working on succeeds, then the unit cost can be brought down so much that it's still a gold mine.

Near zero unit cost is fundamentally different than “bringing down unit cost”. It just isn’t the same.

I'd call $0.18 for a Covid-19 vaccine dose a "near zero cost".

> Imagine every time you needed to troubleshoot something in a computer, you had to break out the multimeter.

What disturbs me sometimes is that many people in software engineering approach debugging like empirical science. Run experiments, gather data, fit some curve, essentially. In the end, a program is a product of the mind. It's pure logic, and fundamentally it's understandable, unlike the real world which can at every turn have new surprises for you. We should think more and measure less.

Part of the trick of having an edge over the rest of the market is to not tell anybody, at least not widely.

That's why all those "I tell you about my secret to making 5 grand a day if you click the link below, for free" youtube ads are obviously all scams.

> Ask your mom how much money she made raising you.

Apart from getting this upside down like others point out -- Mom sent me to daycare, which is exactly the type of specialization discussed in the article. One woman taking care of 5-20 kids instead of 20 moms doing it on their own.

People have been organizing the same on a favours basis for longer than money has existed. I just don't understand how money could possibly qualify as an "unit" here. Now how much someone is willing to spend on something is obviously related to how much they care about it, but to call it the "unit of caring" seems a bit presumptuous.

Through on reflection, I'm not sure what the author is trying to say anyway. He says:

> In our society, this common currency of expected utilons is called "money". It is the measure of how much society cares about something.

But who exactly is society here, and how do you choose to interpret it's spending? It seems much too vague to really argue about.

> I'm talking about stuff like spring cleaning around parks, living areas, recreational areas, sports fields, shoreline, and the list goes on. You don't get paid anything, but people still do it.

As somebody living in a "Nordic country", I respectfully disagree. The municipality often pays "volunteers" for this. It's usually sports clubs and similar organisations that need funding, and instead of just pouring it into them, the municipality "hires" them to do some cleaning, for example. So, after a big event in the city, you see folks all over the place cleaning up, often times kids from soccer clubs or such, but they don't do it entirely voluntarily, they do it because that will pay for their shirts next season or their trip to the training camp in the summer.

That said, it's also common to get involved in neighborhood activities that make things nice, planting some trees, painting some 300-year-old cabin in the woods with a bunch of neighbors that do care, this kind of thing, but I've lived in the U.S. for a while as well and we did that there too. Perhaps mostly with what you'd call hippies that participated mostly, but over here in $nordic_country, it's not like it's everybody who is contributing either. There are the more bourgeios who don't contribute and the I-don't-care-f*k-off type of neighbors as well.

It's all approximate. People are not fully rational, but they are not fully irrational either.

Seen the blog? It's literally called "Less Wrong". It's not perfect, but it provides interesting insights. As such, I found that article valuable.

Wow. Best comment I've read this year! (Like, seriously. Kudos!)