cesimpson

So far, I’ve written about two different ways to convince individuals to contribute to a group where it is in their best interest to do so, but when being the first adopter might be a prohibitively risky proposition. To recap:

1. Borrow or otherwise accumulate and appropriate sum of resources to create an infrastructure, then sell access to that infrastructure. The fax machine is a fine example, but much business works this way. Someone takes out loan to start the business with the understanding s/he might not have positive cash flow for a few years. S/he then has to convince the group (through marketing and sales) to buy the product or service, thus repaying the loan and paying a profit.
2. Accumulate funds through government tax dollars.

The upside of the first is that it (often) rewards and encourages good ideas with profit. The downside is that it can often be too risky. That is, even very good ideas might not ever get off the ground because the potential entrepreneur is too risk averse to take out the requisite loan needed. Also, it (often) relies on banks to provide the loans - these days banks are particularly stingy with their money, regardless the validity of the idea.

The upside of the second is that the risk is widely distributed. If the idea fails, each person’s stake is usually so small as to be unnoticed. There are some counter-examples, certainly - modern warfare is one of them - but most government-run projects are (compared to the size of the entire population) relatively small.

For instance, the National Institutes of Health spends a little more than $31 billion annually on medical research. About 80% of that money is awarded through about 50,000 grants to researchers and universities around the country. If we assume an average distribution, each grant is ~$500,000. Divide that by the 307 million people in the US, comes to $0.0016 per person per year.

$31,200,000,000.00 * 80% = $24,960,000,000.00
$24,96,000,000.00 / 50,000 grants = $499,200.00 per grant
$499,200.00 per grant / 307,006,550 people = $0.001626 per person per grant

If one of those grants turns out to be a horrible waste, 1/10th of a penny for each of us is a pretty small risk. On the other hand, if the researcher had to put up $500,000 of his/her own money s/he might not be willing to take the risk.

The downside, of course, is that there’s often little incentive to do things efficiently (if it’s not your money) and that it involves coersion (if you don’t pay your $0.0016/per grant, you go to jail). I’m not a big fan of coersion and think that, almost always, there’s a better way.

Monday Workouts

Due to the holiday, the gym was closed on Monday. I changed my schedule so I was outside on Monday. I went to a local park with a seriously huge hill all the local kids sled on.

15x

Sprint Up Hill

Catch Breath

Hard.

Wednesday Workout

It was Military Presses and Deadlifts this morning.

Military Press 5-3-X day

Worked up to 5x Press @ 145#

Deadlift 5-3-X day

Worked up to 9x Pull @ 395#

5x Assistance Work

10x Dip @ BW+50#

5x Chin Up @ BW

10x Deadlift @ 225#

It was a good morning.