On Saturday 23 September 2006 10:18, Mario Ruiz wrote: > You do not seem to place any value on the knowledge component. For > example, "it cost nothing to adjust the screw, but is $100 to know which > screw to adjust".
Yes I do. This is why I charge >= $200/hour, yet the farmhand I employ to fix my fences only gets $20/hour, or the lady doing the ironing only $18/hour But I disagree with your example: I would be very happy to tell people "for nothing" which screw it is they have to adjust, if it was so simple. In medicine, pretty much everything is open source (except for our software and patended medication). You can grab any medical text book and read up how to take out an appendix if you wish. Most people however recognize that some tasks require carefully honed skills that have matured over time in order to do it well - and this is how a I make my money. Not by artificially restricting access to knowledge or shrouding my doings in secrecy. My highest income per hour comes from doing skin flaps after skin cancer surgery or treating fractures. I spend much time explaining the patient in detail what I am going to do and how I am going to do it, what could go wrong and why, and what I am going to do to avoid it. I tell them every little detail. And yet they don't just go, buy a cheap disposable surgery kit and do it themselves in order to save a few hundreds of dollars - because they recognize that the skills component is lacking. But in the heydays of snake oil selling charlatans, self medication was the way to go. The software industry could work on exactly the same principle. It would not make anybody rich quick, but it would guarantee steady good income proportional to the demonstrated level of skills. Horst _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
