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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

If your top priority is providing a service to the community (e.g., education), you need a sustainable support model, whether its as a business or through someone else's charitable donations.

If your top priority is a profit-making business, you need to provide a product that is (or, at a minimum, people perceive as) valuable.

Perhaps you can't have two top priorities (I actually am not sure I agree that this is the case, I don't see that it is actually impossible for two priorities to be equal in priority and above all others), but even if you can't, its quite possible for "business" to be a means and "education" to be the goal, and vice versa. They aren't incompatible.

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Exactly. Tesla Motors comes to mind as a company for which "electrification of the world transportation" is the goal, and "profitable business" is only means to an end.

I understand the fear though; most of the companies we interact with (and I'd wager, 90% of startups we see here) are what I call toilet-paper companies - they'd gladly switch from whatever it is they're doing to manufacturing toilet paper if that would render more profit or increase chances of getting acquihired; their top priority is business, not the goal. I hope that Starfighter isn't such toilet-paper endeavour.

As a public company isn't it Tesla's obligation to try to run a (eventually) profitable business?

Sure. Did 'TeMPOraL say anything contrary to that?

It is. And Elon Musk stated repeatedly that it's a secondary goal, means to an end. There's a lot of wiggle room between "profitable business" and a "toilet paper company".

Which is why I was careful to prepend "generous" to every instance of "education" in my response. Starfighter isn't generosity of knowledge, it's barter of it.

Perhaps what you're saying is true in that universities have a financing division, but my point is that this isn't a case of university. The focus is on how they're going to make money as middlemen (and dwarves will sing about their riches), not how their business is subservient to their idealistic educational aims.

Even if you are being generous with your time and effort, you can't carry out an effort with any kind of reach without some support model. Financing it through its own operations may not be the only choice, but its not a choice incompatible with generous motivation.

The thing is, making money off providing a useful service that benefits society as a whole isn't immoral, so I don't see why it's that big of a deal. Nobody is forcing anyone to participate.

EDIT: In fact, socially rewarding companies that do good things incentivizes others to adopt ethical strategies and might do more good than a vow-of-poverty educational service provider.

> The thing is, making money off providing a useful service that benefits society as a whole isn't immoral, so I don't see why it's that big of a deal. Nobody is forcing anyone to participate.

Of course it's not immoral but still, knowing whether "a useful service" or "making money off it" is a top priotity for the company is important. Most of the companies you and I interact with are of the second type, and I guess this is at the root of throwawaymaroon's worry.

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