Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological tangents. Those are less interesting than whatever they tangent off from. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20305597 and marked it off-topic.

microscopes (hand-built ones like this) require a great deal of additional manual labor on top of assembly. It's not culturally imposed- you need to master a ton of important and complicated optical stuff before this device works well.

Time isn't free.

It is given to us freely everyday without asking. What we do with it determines its value.

If you create powerful microscopes with that time, what value would be determined?

I think everyone has 3 numbers. A number that they will not go below, a number that two parties can agree on for a transaction, and a number which they would be extremely happy with (with no upper limit obviously). No different than negotiating a salary / contract which is what it is. I think when someone designs something with the intent to sell it however, that cost of research and development gets baked into the expected returns on the volume of sales. Its like an artist who sells originals versus an artist who sells copies of artwork, if that makes sense.

Every hour costs us one hour of our lives.