> There is a prevalent view of economy that insists businesses sell their products at the minimum price they can still make a profit at [...] A Marxist view of economy, if I must.

That's actually how competition is supposed to work in capitalism. If you sell your products at much higher than the minimum price, someone else can make a profit by selling slightly cheaper and taking over your market share.

Interestingly that's one of the Marxist critiques. The market simply is not efficient enough to work fully. The effort to get Lego2 off the ground is simply too high and Lego gets an effective monopoly in their market segment (premium blocks).

If Lego was nationalized then the excess earnings that go into the owners' pockets as dividends or asset value would be realized by the people. But that of course leads to different inefficiencies (investors don't invest, etc...).

That's contingent on the competition offering a similar experience and quality, at a smaller price point. As a parent comment pointed out, no LEGO knockoff has been able to provide the same experience as LEGO.

I think what the commenter is getting at is that it's not even about competition. People get mad when companies charge more than is necessary to make what they deem a reasonable profit.

Of course, as you mention, in capitalism, a competitor is free to go in and undercut the leading brand, but they have to be able to sell why they're better AND cheaper.

> Also, the idea that chess is a good proxy for genius is a bit out of date.

He wrote that the reason he chose chess was because it was objectively measurable. You play the game, you either win or you lose; there is no way to dispute the outcome.

Imagine that you have dozen children, each of them genius at something different, and that you are surrounded by people who want to prove you wrong. Whatever the artistic genius does, the people who hate you can simply say "yeah, he did something technically impressive, but it's lacking the... nebulous artistic qualities that only we can judge... therefore, not a true genius". Now the chess genius comes and wins every tournament against the adults, there is no way to argue that "yeah, he won all the chess tournaments, but... for some reason we still don't consider him to be a chess grandmaster".

Yeah, it's easier to do the difficult and boring stuff when it's actually easy and interesting for you.

Lots of examples in sports. Tiger Woods loved practicing. Most golfers (like me..) enjoy about 30 mins at the range... then it's torture.

Exactly. Up to some point, you actually do well because you are smart. Then, in the middle of the game, the rules change (from your perspective), and it may catch you by surprise.

It would be much better for the gifted children to attend schools where their effort is visible since the beginning. That is, schools with other gifted children.

For example, in math, my kids didn't learn anything new during their first three years of the elementary school, because they already knew numbers and addition at kindergarten age. Yet they were forced to sit there for three years. It would have been better to give them a book to read, or a collection of interesting problems to solve.

> Exactly. Up to some point, you actually do well because you are smart.

No, you do well because you put in the effort. Even trivial effort is still effort. Sometimes it's all that's genuinely needed (quite often in fact!) and it's important to realize this - but not always, and that's important to realize as well.

> my kids didn't learn anything new during their first three years

I think it's almost always possible to revise even these 'trivial' subjects in more depth. Granted, it's hard to do this in elementary math without some kind of outside involvement - someone to explicitly introduce the nuances. Other subjects this is quite a bit easier.

I think it does provide some education for the average child. It's just when you are not average that it fails you.

There is Libre Office https://www.libreoffice.org/

> only to realize moments later that it was a thoughtless machine sending him the letter rather than a real human being

Yeah, realizing that thoughtless machines are still more thankful that real human beings would make me depressed.

That's why the social networks don't want to talk about the bots, but they are happy to have them.

The customers these days are willing to pay for programs full of bugs that require enormous amounts of resources, so the craft no longer generates profits.

But it also depends on the organization. If your managers love to micro-manage, you will be paid to do things, because someone else believes they know better than you.