would love to get your comments on our efforts at Surfmark (now focused on education but still open for everyone)
required disclaimer: founder, surfmark
Here is a straightforward reason that no one who claims to be some sort of economist (social or otherwise) can argue against:
India has 1.2 billion people and is not particularly endowed with wealth that it can dig out of the ground. So the only way to create wealth is to turn 'sand-into-silicon' aka make productivity gains using the only abundant resource it has - the human resource.
Now if this particular mission can inspire .0001% of additional population to aspire for non-manual labor employment (i.e. study STEM etc), the productivity gain from those people will pay for this mission many times over (I haven't cared to do the math here because I just want to illustrate what I thought is an obvious point which people somehow gloss over).
Population of India: 1.252 billion people.
0.0001% o that: 1252 people.
GDP of India: 1.877 trillion USD.
Per capita: 1499.
So if we just applied these figures to the above number of people, we get an increase in GDP of 1.876 million USD. Which is not much. I know you were making a point.
I think this is an unfair calculation because it's not taking into account the fact that those people will go into STEM-type jobs. So it might be a good idea to compare it to the IT industry of India that produces revenues of 100 billion USD using 2.8 million people. That's 35 USD per person.
Combining this figure and the one above yields a rough GDP increase of 45 million dollars. We're certainly getting there in terms of order of magnitude.
To put things into perspective, 0.0001% is 1 in a million!
Not having a 'scalable' business model (or having to prove that the model is indeed scalable) hasn't deterred other companies from going public and having an awesome final exist (from Investors' perspective).
Example: Successfactors.
Here is the excerpt of their S-1 from IPO and their last 10-K as an independent company:
http://mark.ly/KgA6PO/
The point being that as long as Box's bankers can convince the investment managers that there is an eventual buyer, box will have a decently oversubscribed order book at IPO. Of-course roadshow can't and won't mention this.
We have an extension (for chrome) and a bookmarklet (and ipad app) that use pdf.js to add comments to pdfs and save specific pages from pdfs. The extension and bookmarklet allow commenting on any page that can be rendered on a web page (including Pdfs!).
We are now targeting it for education.
Will love feedback (provided our site doesn't crash)
http://www.surfmark.com
targets different group of investors (who like the fixed income component) and is quicker to issue and less costly in terms of coupon rate and transaction costs.
Tesla's high stock price 'begs' a convertible offering which lets the Company offer equity by the 'back door' without impacting the stock negatively.
My view - The biggest difference is the underlying system (law, bureaucracy and even infrastructure)still being used in India is the one built to extract and export resources out as efficiently as possible. That's the legacy of 150 years of colonialism and Indians simply have never been able to do the challenging work (various reasons) of changing these but for a few word changes here and there. This is most stark in nation's civil and police services.
Don't quite agree; it's time we stop putting the colonial legacy as a reason. The reason? It's been 65 years since colonialism ended and that's enough time to fix things. A lot of things have been fixed too but the real problem is a huge population. It's trivial to fix things for 1 million people compared to the 1.2 billion people and that's the real problem; not colonial legacy.
'War' is a very specific term of the trade. Using any and all tools available when you are at War can be easily defended by a whole lot of people (not everyone0. US is not officially at war in Yemen or Pakistan or for that matter Afghanistan. Hence, I think, use of drones introduces another dimension to the arguments. Ultimately, there is and always has been one principle used by humanity - 'Might is right'. Of-course smart ones can always hide this core principle in layers of arguments of convenience.
It may yet not be there for most (not necessarily because of inherent nutrient-biology issues but because of lack of long term testing) but it will be a damn good alternative for a few hundred million across the world:
http://southasia.oneworld.net/news/food-shortage-forcing-chi...
Do you really think this is some revolutionary, new idea? Do you?! Do you think of all the thousands of students who go to University for 4-7 years to learn about one subject - Food - haven't thought "hey? why don't we just mix the basic chemicals together and solve the world's food crisis?".
This is pure hubris! This idea has been pursued for decades by people who have dedicated themselves to scientific rigour.
I'll say it again. The founders of Soylent have Engineer's Disease. They think because they're engineers they're experts in food science. That's delusional.
>Do you think of all the thousands of students who go to University for 4-7 years to learn about one subject - Food - haven't thought "hey? why don't we just mix the basic chemicals together and solve the world's food crisis?".
Surely you are intelligent enough to realize that this is not a serious attempt at fixing anybody's "food crisis", and rather it's a convenience product aimed at affluent Westerners? I mean, disregarding that $65/week is higher than the average income in many parts of the world -- and far more than roughly 50% of the world's population can afford -- they're marketing this through the Internet! It costs nearly as much as my grocery bill, and I'm white and live in America!
This isn't in the category of "feed the world" products, which is why academia has had and will continue to have little interest in something like this. In fact, many people have through the years done similar things in a more ad-hoc fashion: a cousin of mine ate a diet consisting almost entirely of yogurt when he had no cooking equipment beyond a yogurt maker, and there's a rather infamous tale of some dude who lived entirely on raw beef:
He's still doing it, by the way. It seems to work.
And yet it would take a doctorate in insanity to think that any of these propositions could "feed the world", when we have trouble distributing enough simple dry rice to meet everyone's basic calorie requirements.
As long as Soylent makes up less than 75% of your diet, and you still eat some vegetables, I'd give you a roughly 100% chance of being just fine. Even if you really go whole hog on the stuff, it probably won't be that bad -- people have eaten worse diets. Much worse.
For me, the central discovery here is not that a monotone food product is possible -- that's easy, just take some reasonably healthy foods and stick them in a blender -- but that people actually like to live this way. If you'd asked me before this all began, I'd have bet they'd all get bored in a month.
> This isn't in the category of "feed the world" products,
From the linked article:
50% of the food produced globally is wasted, and food makes for the largest component of municipal garbage. If not for this waste there would be plenty of food to adequately nourish everyone alive. 2 million people are killed annually by smoke inhalation from indoor cooking stoves alone. 70% of americans are overweight or obese. 1 in 7 people globally are malnourished, and 1 in 3 in the developing world suffer from deficiency. Countless others are living hand-to-mouth, subsistence farming, hindering economic development. Even in the developed world, agriculture is the most dangerous industry to work in by occupational injuries and illnesses, and obesity is on the rise.
By taking years to spoil, dramatically reducing cost, and easing transportation and storage, soylent could have a dramatic effect on hunger and malnutrition.
The business plan appears to be trivial: he can claim it will solve the food crisis, basic economics (he simply won't be able to reduce the cost below current levels) makes this thoroughly impossible, but it doesn't matter to his real customers (you), in the same way that a Toyota Prius ad can show the car driving through a field of flowers and causing them to bloom, even though cars can't do that!
Now, not having any idea how difficult it is to scale production of a physical product is a pretty serious form of ignorance, so my apologies if anyone can verify that Rhinehart intends for anybody to believe this.
nope not revolutionary or new at all. Just that they are actually going through with it. With the free marketing they are getting, they have a shot at making mixing-chemicals-into-food a profitable business! And unless they are profitable, they can't afford to be charitable.
