I mean not all businesses need to thrive. If the thing generates significant profits for a while then the founder can retire and either sell it or just let it die. If it's not a publicly-traded company there's no fiduciary duty to do anything more than that.
Ehh if you look at other "modern" countries you see workers being paid half as much. Not to say that the US is any sort of paradise, but there are definitely tradeoffs that favor either direction.
If you look at the market, this is a pretty small fraction of gaming revenue. Sure these things will continue to exist in competitive format, but a significant majority of gaming is not highly latency-sensitive in this way.
fwiw I like owning my own hardware, but pretending that cloud gaming isn't going to happen because of the single-digit percentage of gamers that absolutely need locality for competition purposes is just ignoring market dynamics -- there's a huge amount of money to be made in cloud gaming and that's really the only thing that matters.
This doesn't really bother me. My experience at football games tells me that, regardless of socioeconomic stature, no one really handles themselves well at sporting events after a few shots.
It's not too hard to keep a small number of people from causing chaos, but security presence costs money. Seems logical that VIPs would spend enough to make the security presence net profitable.
In a perfect world, we could either trust everyone to behave or we could afford to put security everywhere to enforce it, but we don't live in a perfect world.
The healthcare thing is really a moot point. Everyone who can afford private medical care in the UK goes private for anything they can. The NHS is good (and I _do_ mean just 'good' -- the quality of US healthcare is very uneven across the country, but the best care possible, by a substantial margin, is undeniably in the US) for emergency medicine and surgery, but the general consensus is that it just-barely-kind-of-works-sometimes for everything else.
As an American expat in London, I think the thing that consistently shocks me is how neither Brits nor Americans understand how much poorer Brits are than Americans. The median London wage is something like 30k GBP / 40k US. In New York (where I lived before London) that number is ~70k, and the costs of living are pretty comparable.
And as much as I love that the NHS is a thing, it's not a reasonable comparison. No one I know who has a choice uses NHS services apart from emergency medicine or surgery. Everyone I know who can afford it has private health insurance anyway.
In general, everyone I know in this country either has serious family money or is downright poor by American standards. There really isn't much in between.
TO BE FAIR: it's generally much more pleasant to be poor in the UK than it is in the US. NHS is miles better than nothing, which is what many Americans have to deal with.
It is certainly true that there are many inventions that pose some sort of threat to humanity, and that they are generally pursued by people who have some sort of personal/professional interest in their development. In that respect, this isn't particularly different.
The sentiment of "Oh by the way this stuff is super bad and dangerous so we should be careful" just rings pretty hollow from someone who is at the tail-end of a career spent in pursuit of that exact bad, dangerous thing. If he were 20 years younger or not wealthy it's hard to believe that he would be saying this out loud, even if he believed it.
Also this sentiment rings _extra_ hollow from someone who supposedly left CMU because he didn't want to accept Pentagon funds or work on things that would be used for war. That feels like either an incoherent value system or some pretty substantial half-truths to me.
Yeah I don't want to be unfair or unkind, but his responses in this article seem to reflect rather poorly on his character. The thought process seems to be something like:
"There was an opportunity for someone to gain notoriety and money at a profound cost to the human race. Someone was going to do it. I don't actually feel bad about being the one to benefit, but it is fashionable to pretend to have a conscience about such things."