Ideas are worthless

I have a friend who is normally a very intelligent man, and an extraordinary computer programmer. However, he has an IDEA, and he's unwilling to publish it in detail on his site - he wants to discuss it with a big company, to get the cash he believes he deserves for his idea.

I was unable to persuade him that ideas are worthless.

Here's an idea that would be worth a lot of money... if ideas were worth anything. Let's get rid of 99% of the existing government bureaucracy. (I'm an anarchist, I want to get rid of all government, but that's harder to sell. Most people would agree that 99% of the government is useless, though. grin)

Just think of the advantages:
* you save on salaries and bribes
* you force the leeches to actually work for a living and make something even marginally useful (like hamburgers)
* a lot less spending on "feel-good" projects like houses for the poor which cost a million bucks a piece and look pretty much like a shack
* ... and I'm sure a lot more, you get the point

What about getting rid only of the armies? I mean, most people are scared of guns. And if guns are bad, and people shouldn't have them, then the place we should start removing them is definitely the army - after all, we know that armies kill people, that's their job description :D

Now, are these ideas worth anything? Not even the time I spent writing them down. The implementation, on the other hand, would be worth billions. Get that perfected, sell it to the Americans, and become the richest man in the world. Eat your heart out, Bill Gates! grin

See? It's worthless to think "hey, I don't really like the links Yahoo returns, what about making a better search engine?". You have to actually work your butt off and do it to become Google. If you're the kind of person that has great ideas, you probably have a dozen a day. They're worthless to you, and they're worthless to everyone else - make a couple of them real, and everything changes.

Just a rant, of course.

Comments

gmatei said…
This comment has been removed by the author.
10:04 AM
Marcel said…
Yep. It's you I had in mind :)
10:16 AM
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