> A better measuring cup is of trivial benefit to humanity
Oh, so it is of benefit, is it? What, exactly, is the minimal amount of positive benefit to humanity I must exert in my work to be deemed worthy in your optics?
What, exactly, is it about nursing, as a whole, that makes the field universally superior to the measuring cup industry? Is all of nursing equally deserving? What if you, as a nurse, spend your entire career caring for the morbidly obese, extending their lives so then can eat more smores? Is it OK to care for the obese, but not to feed them better desserts?
Human development is a long, hard trudge of incremental improvements, with a few leaps here and there. If you insist on sitting around waiting to be part of a leap, resisting the temptation to incrementally bringing benefit to your fellow man, you're missing the forest for all the trees.
Please don't address other users this way on Hacker News. (It's a bad way to respond to provocation because it degrades the discourse further and invites worse.)
I would think that now that measuring cup has saved many times the time taken to design it, and the people whose time has been saved include (and is not limited to) doctors, nurses, various scientists, and your 'everyday' man. So I think it is quite obvious that the contribution of the angled measuring cup could indeed be much greater than any single nurse.
The marketplace disagrees strongly. Otherwise the cost of an angled measuring cup would approximate the cost of a nurse, which it does not -- the difference is at least 4 [decimal] orders of magnitude.
That's the wrong comparison: you have to combine the cost of ALL angled cup (possibly deduct the value of all non angled cup) and compare with the cost of one nurse, since the two scenarios are: angled cups vs no angled cup at all and one more nurse
The marketplace won't necessarily value the angled measuring cup inventor as a nurse at all, indeed it may value them negatively (eg by reducing patients who attend a clinic because this person is a nurse there). That would mean that on a market based evaluation, for a person who makes a bad enough nurse, the availability of the cup "improvement" would have to be detrimental to measuring-cup users in order for the market to value the person as a nurse above them as a measuring-cup inventor.
As you note there's a big problem with working out how the market values the item in the first place. Just because something costs more doens't mean it's better value, of course. In a way if the cup costs less than the traditional measuring-cup it's a better product; in another way if it costs more but the same number buy it then it's a better product. You have to make a cost-benefit judgement.
If people say they wouldn't buy a new angled measuring-cup just for the USP, but that they would replace a broken traditional cup with the new style one, how then do you establish the value? You have to take in to account the person's value judgements on disposal of working items. I don't think you can genuinely make an objective market-based analysis here?
I do not understand this. It seems to be an argument that a measuring cup is more valuable than a nurse. All the words in the world won't convince. Ever been sick?
Yes. A measuring cup that aids 10 million people in saving 10c is more valuable to society than a specific person becoming a nurse [who makes you sick].
Obviously if you need a nurse then 10 million measuring cups won't make you better. But if you need a measuring cup, a nurse won't really be that helpful either.
The world needs both, but generally we don't need people who have inventive ideas to shun them in favouring of doing things they are ill-suited and unmotivated to do.
A measuring cup is not valuable than a nurse. Hundreds of millions of measuring cups serving hundreds of millions of people, on the other hand, IS more valuable than a nurse
Oh, so it is of benefit, is it? What, exactly, is the minimal amount of positive benefit to humanity I must exert in my work to be deemed worthy in your optics?
What, exactly, is it about nursing, as a whole, that makes the field universally superior to the measuring cup industry? Is all of nursing equally deserving? What if you, as a nurse, spend your entire career caring for the morbidly obese, extending their lives so then can eat more smores? Is it OK to care for the obese, but not to feed them better desserts?
Human development is a long, hard trudge of incremental improvements, with a few leaps here and there. If you insist on sitting around waiting to be part of a leap, resisting the temptation to incrementally bringing benefit to your fellow man, you're missing the forest for all the trees.
PS:
> A new dessert is actually a detractor
Bullshit.
EDIT: Try not to be provocative.