100%. We spend more money working on cures for erectile dysfunction than ebola. We spend more money working on cures male pattern baldness than we do diseases that plague the third world. How many smart amazing engineers have worked for the auto industry over the last 100 years when their expertise could of been used in a civil manner to improve infrastructure and our overall existence? This is capitalism and whoever has the money can buy up the most talent. Whether that is a good use for that talent doesn't seem to matter.

I am guessing the people working on the erectile dysfunction medicines are motivated by financial compensation; and that it happens that the people who provide such compensation do happen to intersect with the people who have ED but do not intersect with those who have Ebola.

This is more than capitalism, it's freedom. If you are suggesting that we spend more money on Ebola or public transport, that's tyranny.

“We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.” -Kurt Vonnegut, University of Oregon speech, 1990

> This is more than capitalism, it's freedom. If you are suggesting that we spend more money on Ebola or public transport, that's tyranny.

Yikes. It’s actually exactly capitalism. We spent more money than god on COVID research basically from 0. That research didn’t restrict freedoms. We decided to co-opt capitalism and pump money directly where we needed it. This incentives people to research Covid within the capitalist market. We could do the same for Ebola or Public transportation but we chose not to.

> This is more than capitalism, it's freedom. If you are suggesting that we spend more money on Ebola or public transport, that's tyranny.

Anything can be whatever if you define your terms in obtuse or unusual ways.

Launder it by burying the questionable definitions a couple layers down from the garbage you’ve set out to “prove”, and you can fool even some smart folks.

The right word is surveillance.

Ubiquitous surveillance is what pays most of the VerySmart gathered here.

Advertising is just the part of the market we can talk about in stand ups.

Advertising is the reason for the surveilance. The whole reason Facebook gathers all this data on its users is to drive their ad platform.

Knowledge is power.

Do you really think that the usefulness of knowledge is limited to trying to sell you stuff?

If so, you’ve never thought about it very deeply.