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Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley

nytimes.com

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Re: Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley

#191

Post by maxxxxx »

luso_brazilian wrote: post #9

> "There was room for improvement, he argued, for what he called “job-centric” economics and politics. In a job-centric system, job creation would be the nation’s No. 1 objective, with the government setting priorities and arraying the forces necessary to achieve the goal, and with businesses operating not only in their immediate profit interest but also in the interests of “employees, and employees yet to be hired.”…

Why do we always have only extreme choices? All these approaches can work if you continue improving on things that don't work. It's like having only C++, PHP or JavaScript as choices for your system. They all can work but you have to do them right. They also can be a complete mess if you do them wrong.

Re: Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley

#192

Post by yenant »

narrator wrote: post #157
littletimmy wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate on your last paragraph please? What is the fundamental cause in your opinion? Or are you saying it's like turtles all the way down?

The last paragraph is just speculation as to what they might find based on some investment research I've done while traveling in various developing countries. My speculation is that land prices in America are vastly inflated because there is so much credit available to buy them while in developing countries there is very little credit available for borrowing against land. In Argentina and most of Latin America for ex…

There is definitely some (currently poorly explored and undefined as far as my efforts to locate scholarly research went) Tsiolkovsky rocket equation-like [1] effect going on with land pricing on a PPP basis. I, too, have been stymied by the "just so" pat answers economics gives to the questions you raised, and the entire field ducks reflexivity and quantification issues, even when modern Internet-driven tools and data are available to start empirically addressing the questions with potentially trillions of data points each week to mine.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation

Re: Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley

#193

Post by majewsky »

mozumder wrote: post #165
floatrock wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exponential growth. There's a myth out there that we are unconstrained by physical resources. And it has largely been true "since the beginning of time". But that time is quickly coming to an end -- the next big generation shift will be the acceptance of a resource-constrained world imho. Look at meat consumption. It takes something like 10x as much energy to grow a calorie of meat as it does a calorie of vegetables.…

There is no limit to consumption or available resources.

There may be no upper bound on the absolute amount of available resources, but there is still a limit on how fast you can expand.

Consider the following maximal example: If all of Earth's resources are exhausted (whatever that means, I don't rely on any exact definition), we need to head outwards into space. Because our expansion is limited by the speed of light, we can at most cover a distance

  r(t) = c * t
and thus a volume of space

  V(t) = (c * t)^3
where t is the time spent travelling through space. The amount of available resources (assuming an even distribution of resources on the scale of the universe) is proportional to V, and thus to t^3.

Cubic growth is much much much much less than exponential growth. In fact, the exponential function can be shown to grow faster than any power function.

Re: Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley

#194

Post by greggman »

lsc wrote: post #64
jessedhillon wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly explain this to me: in what sense do we not need advertising? I don't want to research the 200 brands of almond milk or 85 sushi restaurants in my neighborhood -- I want some proxy, however imperfect, for their quality, availability and value. I want someone to come find me and tell me that their milk or restaurant or whatever exists. And as someone who sells things, how am I supposed to make the public awar…

> How should I best let consumers know that my product is different because of its features, or the craftsmanship, or whatever. Should we all live in universes bounded by the speed of chatter, so that HN's pure market sensibilities can be satisfied? Should I just wait for customers to stumble upon the right keywords to make my product show up in their ad-free search results? the problem is that there's a conflict of…

I come from games. It seems like advertising is the only way to effectively "get the word out" about my new game. I'm not seeing how that's useless. I also don't see the conflict of interest. If I make a bad game and people buy it they're not going to buy my next game so that problem is solved. So I all I'm trying to do through advertising is inform the people who might want a game like the one I created that my game exists and could they please take a look.

Where's the problem?

Re: Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley

#195

Post by aninhumer »

mozumder wrote: post #145
mistermann wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't watch ads and yet I still buy things. Granted, not as much as if I watched ads I'm sure.

If you don't buy something, and hold off on spending, then the GDP goes down, as the velocity of money slows down. If 1 dollar is spent 5 times a year, that economy has a higher GDP than when that 1 dollar is spent 4 times a year. Advertising makes sure that money is spent quickly, to increase the GDP by increasing the velocity of money in an economy. If you get rid of advertising, you slow down the economy.

If advertising is making people buy things that don't actually improve their lives, then that GDP increase is just a bigger number, with no corresponding increase in utility.

Re: Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley

#196

Post by tim333 »

id wrote: post #147
luso_brazilian wrote: post #9

> "There was room for improvement, he argued, for what he called “job-centric” economics and politics. In a job-centric system, job creation would be the nation’s No. 1 objective, with the government setting priorities and arraying the forces necessary to achieve the goal, and with businesses operating not only in their immediate profit interest but also in the interests of “employees, and employees yet to be hired.”…

You know that the "laissez-faire" capitalist alternative in this situation would mean that people starve?

I'm not sure there's been perfect laissez-fair but if you define it thus:

"an economic system in which transactions between private parties are free from government interference such as regulations, privileges, tariffs, and subsidies. "

Then the best implementation I've seen was probably Hong Kong under UK governance. They had pretty much zero tariffs, light regulation, no industrial subsidy. The result was one of the fastest growing countries in the world with zero starvation.

(16% of US GDP/capita in 1960, 76% in 2016

"According to Index of Economic Freedom, Hong Kong has had the highest degree of economic freedom in the world since the inception of the Index in 1995.")

Re: Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley

#197

Post by taneq »

jessedhillon wrote: post #50
kiba wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The advertising industrial complex is paradoxically what employers are willing to pay for, but we humans don't need.

Honestly explain this to me: in what sense do we not need advertising? I don't want to research the 200 brands of almond milk or 85 sushi restaurants in my neighborhood -- I want some proxy, however imperfect, for their quality, availability and value. I want someone to come find me and tell me that their milk or restaurant or whatever exists. And as someone who sells things, how am I supposed to make the public awar…

It baffles me that your (imho) perfectly valid and well thought out post is getting downvoted in this of all places, where advertising revenue (as the most straightforward way to monetise a web service) must underpin the employment of a significant proportion of posters.

Re: Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley

#198

Post by majewsky »

matchagaucho wrote: post #39

I love Andy, but it can be difficult to reconcile this article with the pro-globalization message in his book "High Output Management". Had Intel outsourced the manufacturing of their memory chips during their "scale-up" phase, it's conceivable that they may have established more "partners" and less "competitors"... similar to what Apple has accomplished today with iPhone manufacturing.

"High Output Management" was released in 1983. The article referenced here is from 2010. Maybe he has just changed his opinion.

Re: Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley

#199

Post by zanny »

greggman wrote: post #194
lsc wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How should I best let consumers know that my product is different because of its features, or the craftsmanship, or whatever. Should we all live in universes bounded by the speed of chatter, so that HN's pure market sensibilities can be satisfied? Should I just wait for customers to stumble upon the right keywords to make my product show up in their ad-free search results? the problem is that there's a conflict of…

I come from games. It seems like advertising is the only way to effectively "get the word out" about my new game. I'm not seeing how that's useless. I also don't see the conflict of interest. If I make a bad game and people buy it they're not going to buy my next game so that problem is solved. So I all I'm trying to do through advertising is inform the people who might want a game like the one I created that my game…

Because you are describing the informational construct known as discovery, which can - and is - provided through many methods in every field, including gaming, and does not require advertising whatsoever.

Minecraft is basically a cultural icon now, despite having no effective advertising throughout its growth years. It was only after it was already gargantuan that Minecraft Pocket Edition started seeing adverts, primarily because the parent company ran out of ideas of what to do with their money, which is often the motivator for a lot of advertising budgets.

Specific to the games industry, discovery is a problem if consumers both A. have no peer group involved in gaming to get recommendations from and B. have no sources of discovery media (ie, rankings, reviews, etc) to find games themselves. Which I'd definitely say is true - the two largest game stores in the world, Google Play and Steam, have incredibly bad discovery mechanisms built in, and the former's entire market is mostly an appeal to getting on top of said discovery mechanism through psychological manipulation in skinner boxes.

Re: Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley

#200

Post by tim333 »

hhw wrote: post #125
billions wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hong Kong is a prime example of the government improving quality of life by staying out of the way of business. http://triblive.com/mobile/6727056-96/hong-kong-free

Hong Kong's prosperity in the 80's and 90's had more to do with being the gateway between China and the West as trade started to open up, and less to do with policy or entrepreneurship, as much as some people would like to take credit for such.

HK GDP/capita also grew 1320% between 1960 and 1980 when China trade wasn't really rocking. N Korea also borders and trades mostly with China and it didn't do them much good. Though if you want a counter example Singapore has had more state involvement in the economy and has done even better than HK.

One interesting area where HK has been very non laissez faire is in land ownership. Much of the prime real estate belongs to the government and they can raise money by reclaiming some land and selling it off or renting it out. Also works for Monaco where there is no tax but government controls the real estate. You could argue you could use the same model in the Bay Area to an extent - the government grabs some land, licences fancy blocks for tech workers, auctions off the land with planning permission to builders with the money going to the tax pool. Lower taxes and less accom shortage - win win overall apart from some neighbours complaining about their views.

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