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Comment by readthenotes1 | Hacker News Reader

Re NGOs:

A friend of mine once said

"If the problem weren't so valuable, they would have solved it by now"

That sounds good but makes little sense. Makes just as much sense as the people claiming there is a cure for cancer that works 100% with no side-effects but that "they" hide it because it is so profitable to treat sick people.

I think the strongest counter-signal that there's a "secret cure for cancer" is that rich, powerful people still get it (in various forms), go through debilitating treatment, and often still die.

Unless, of course, they're faking their deaths and transplanting their consciounesses into younger, healthy bodies. Then I got nothing.

Or for a more HN-example. If IT-security wasnt so valueable as an industry we would have solved IT-security long ago.

Well, I think the general counter for a "cure-for-cancer" is the same as electric cars.

The Big4 never wanted EVs with there being a documentary [1] on how much they hated them. However, a company that isn't the big-4 has no issue with creating one.

Same with a cure-for-cancer. Sure, maybe Pfizer doesn't want to cannabalize their market but anybody that isn't Pfizer would love to.

I don't think IT-security fits into the same model though. There's a lot of money in theft so you need a lot of money into anti-theft to counter-act it.

Poverty imo fits the IT-security model more-so than cure-for-cancer. Each dollar you don't pay somebody in Madagascar to farm vanilla is a dollar you get to keep.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_Killed_the_Electric_Car%3F

Your friend isn’t very smart and you’d likely be better off if you stopped quoting them. You’ve just lumped every single NGO in with a very small minority of bad ones - three seconds of research would have spared you from writing that.

Like how Uber solved transport? Or Amazon solved online shopping?

We're not talking about corporations; we're talking about government bureaucracies.

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