Interesting Links for 06-11-2013

[andrewducker]

• iPhone 6 could have sapphire screen as Apple opens plant
  (tags: apple screens iphone )
• Considerable gender, racial, sexuality differences in attitudes toward bisexuality
  (tags: society lgbt )
• India launches first mission to Mars
  (tags: mars india space )
• New Katy Perry album declared a bio-hazard by Australia
  (tags: music australia funny )
• Wartune

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

Just turning this over in my head a bit I think it’s a bit political.

Firstly, the people in the UK who are homeless are more or less cut off from political power. They are often, in practise disenfranchised and even if they were able to vote that’s not a huge amount of political power. Atttempting to get anything done through political side channels is difficult even if there are lots of you, you are well motivated, lead and resourced and you have plenty of time.

Ranged against that is the fact that lots of people quite like rockets and space probes and science and national pride and going to Mars. Many of these people also probably think that being homeless involves some form of contributory negligence on the part of the homeless person and is therefore the homeless person’s problem to solve.

From a utility point of view it’s not immediately obvious that permanently removing a relatively small number of people in the UK from extreme poverty gives as much utility as a small incremental improvement in the lives of many people or a Mars mission.

Especially as the structural reasons why a small number of people end up homeless seem harder to solve.

Personally, I’d like to live in a country with no homeless people but LOOK shiny rockets are GO! I am weak and fickle.

[ext_208701]

It's not that I don't care about the homeless, but as a company sponsor of two spaceflight organisations I happen to think that inspiring the next generation of kids build awesome things is really important.

For every kid that grow up to be an astronaut, tens of thousands of others make incremental improvements in engineering everything in everyday life. The reason those ten thousand do it, is because when they were small there was a possibility that if they were really lucky and worked really hard, they might get to walk on the moon.

Instead I run an ISP which is probably rather more useful to society. But if there was one thing that might motivate me to grow a million pound company into a multi-billion pound company, being able to buy a trip to the moon would be it.

[danieldwilliam]

Inspiration is a good thing for all kinds of reasons I think.

Not just the tangible outcomes but the feeling of being inspired and hopeful is a good thing for people to experience.