Quote Originally Posted by Monty3038 View Post
I find this hard to believe coming from someone who plays a game for profit to make a living. That is, if you are a professional poker player.
Don't hate the player, hate the game. Also, while I do poker for a living, I hate it, and I'm dirt poor because I only do just enough to get by, probably because I hate it. Actually, that's more likely just a product of my stupid existential crisis crap I've been having, but that's a diff thing

I'm actually an excellent case for my point. I'm in a very tough spot in life because I have such difficulty being motivated by profits, yet that's such an important part of having a successful career

Hmm... and it can be argued that only people with money can think this way.
I don't have that much money. In fact, expanding my understanding of these things has provoked the difficulty I have in pursuing money in the first place. That really is a whole different issue though, and it's really just a fallacy anyways

True, scientific and artistic exploration and advances can be addressed to poorer persons on many counts, but can you really say that they did it out of 'goodness' or to make money? Did these artists die broke? Did they try to sell their work? Did the scientists die broke? Were they trying to make an advancement to accomplish a goal or sell what they made that accomplished that goal?
All of the above. You're making the mistake of thinking that pursuing money on some level = money is the root motivator.

Absolutely. It is your business. I also agree you should be able to run it however you want...
So as a business owner, you get to reap most of the profits of hiring employees yet few of the costs of firing them. Layoffs are enormously expensive to the society and economy as a whole. In a myopic world I guess business owners should have incredible autonomy, but in the real world the very system in which that business exists is very interdependent, and not devising policy to reflect that is a mistake

This is why a collective doesn't work well. Some will do their best, most will do something in between and some will do the bare minimum.
Actually, that's the opposite of what happens in a collective responsibility and opportunity paradigm. Curiously, you described what actually happens in our monopoly corporate market to a T