Rich people don’t “invent” stuff but invest their money and get others to work for them. They also get the government to subsidize them and cover their risks. They also get huge tax cuts. The list goes on and on.

As a rule, most of what they use has been created through public investment and public money. That includes, for instance, more than 90% of the components of your beloved iPhone, such as GPS, touch screen, and so on. No, Steve Jobs did not invent those. Sorry. Here is another example. The HIV drug Truvada was invented though public grants. Then it was used and patented (!) by a company called Gilead so that they could sell it for two grant and make billions. That was illegal. As far as I know, nobody went after them. I could give examples for days and days.

The so-called “billionaires space race” is the latest scam in this respect. First of all, don’t forget that capital exists for profit, not for the sake of fascination with the secrets of the cosmos. Those drive scientists, not billionaires. Billionaires got in this to make money, big money. They get huge subsidies and use publicly funded technological inventions that have been available sometimes for decades. The way the astronauts landed today, for instance, is the same as Apollo 13 did so many decades ago. Sometimes, new technologies are there but have not been sufficiently developed and implemented because of underfunding. This has been a chronic issue with public agencies, and NASA is a good example of that. But NASA has been doing fine and making us proud. Who, then, let the Musks and Bezoses of the world in this? Here we see the other side of the corporate scam which politicians readily promote: underfund public sectors, render them ineffective, and then privatize them and allow the sharks to feast. We see this strategy historically implemented in all sectors of the economy and public services. We have reached a state when even Adam Smith, the great theoretic of capitalism, would be called a leftist today. One last example. In recent years, there has been much discussion about the chronically underfunded USPS and its efficiency. I am very suspicious. Who knows how things will develop. Watch out!

Please, think critically about the “entrepreneurship” myth and don’t buy so easily what corporate propaganda sells you. 1984 is already here, alas.

Thinking you’re bullet-proof when you’re young (since after all you’re going to die anyway at some point) when you don’t have a significant other to live for, much less kids, is not all that heroic. Or brave. It feels borderline nihilistic.

People have a very different calculus about risk (like, say, driving on the highway). Some people are hard-wired to run toward strange stuff that’s happening (that could be dangerous) rather than away from it. Does that make them brave? It’s all very much in the moment. You can train yourself to be brave (e.g., run toward danger). On the other hand, I was hiking on a frozen lake in the Dacks and the ice let out an enormous crack and I was onshore looking out at my friends still standing out there moments later.

People always say they’ re no hero when they do something ‘heroic,’ and I tend to believe them. They did ‘the right thing’ in the moment, and good on them. Maybe that’s all being a hero is, and I’m giving the term more credit than it deserves. YMMV.

And that’s just those who bother applying.

I agree that it is probably our best strategy vs. their starters. Then you can put OG on Tatum, but Boston will run screens until they get Tatum iso’ed on to Brunson or KAT. I suppose you can try to have Mitch go under any screen set for Brown so he can lurk. But the mismatches are in their favor.

That was my point. It’s not the bravery element that makes it special, it’s the intellect and combination of skills and other attributes that it takes beyond the bravery.