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It’s Time to Build
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Re: It’s Time to Build
#42> Why shouldn’t regulators and taxpayers demand that Harvard build?
Wait, wut? Last I checked, Harvard is a private institution.
Besides, Harvard produces its graduates because they can be picky on who they can admit. Why would we assume that Harvard can scale to provide a "Harvard education" to someone who didn't qualify to make it in today?
Re: It’s Time to Build
#43"Every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building? What are you building directly, or helping other people to build, or teaching other people to build, or taking care of people who are building?" So, what are you building?
Ultra fast and reliable 3D printing for engineers - submit a file at praxismfg.com and we courier deliver a plastic copy in 0-2 days at a price you'll love.
We run on proprietary printers built in house with advanced features like support-less 5-axis FDM, multi-material/multi-resolution printing, and integrated QC.
The real goal is to combine manufacturing services with a machine tool OEM like Kern Microtechnik has done in precision milling. Combining those two businesses strongly differentiates your service, freeing you from the race-to-no-margins that's wrecking every other 3D printing hub right now, and subsidizes 100-1000x more in-house hardware "testing" than any regular OEM can afford to do, which lets you build great new machine tools at lightning speed.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#44> I’m with Nicholas Stern when he says that capitalism is how we take care of people we don’t know — all of these fields are highly lucrative already and should be prime stomping grounds for capitalist investment, good both for the investor and the customers who are served.
I'm not familiar with Nicholas Stern, and will look him up, but does anyone here want to elaborate as if you were talking to a five-year-old?
Re: It’s Time to Build
#45I broadly agree with him, but I do think his opinions on the 'right' are more due to media portrayals of right wingers rather than the actual opinions of those 'on the right'. He says. > The right must fight hard against crony capitalism, regulatory capture, ossified oligopolies, risk-inducing offshoring, and investor-friendly buybacks in lieu of customer-friendly (and, over a longer period of time, even more investo…
> Regulatory capture is something the right is adamantly against usually. I mean, most right-leaning politicians in America are into reducing regulation.
Getting rid of regulation is the ultimate regulatory capture.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#46> I expect this essay to be the target of criticism. Here’s a modest proposal to my critics. Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own! What do you think we should build? There’s an excellent chance I’ll agree with you.
What we need to build is the capacity to make investments in building backstops against low-prob, high-risk, collective risks.
For almost all of those risks, the problem isn't "what to build", it's that we know what to build and keep failing to build it (or we build it just to burn it down again whenever the next crisis hits). The problem is building sustainable capacity.
Here's my idea. Tax the living hell out of capital. Especially venture capital leveraging decades of gov't investment. Earmark the money for disaster prep.
One possible implementation: gov't gets 50% stake on every patent traceable to any federal grant and every company whose founders were funded through federal grants. I don't think that's insane. Y Combinator takes a 7% cut for 150K. The median NSF grant is substantially larger, and NSF grants are "tiny" compared to other grants, and most of that work happens in places where the funded employees can live comfortably on 25K/year. We would expect an even larger cut than 7% for substantially more investment (often millions) and all of that in low CoL areas. But Gov't gets 0%.
Governments DID see this coming, both federal and state. Governments DID build what was need to respond. California, at one time, was prepared for exactly this crisis. Same as France. The 2008 financial crisis wiped out state budgets, and then the fed govt suffered 6 years of gridlock and austerity driven by owners of capital. Government preparations for this substantial and real risk DID exist, but were liquidated so that the rest could fit in a bathtub to be drowned.
None of that would have had to happen if federal and state governments had a non-trivial stake in FAANG, or even just G.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#47Re: It’s Time to Build
#48> Why shouldn’t regulators and taxpayers demand that Harvard build? Wait, wut? Last I checked, Harvard is a private institution. Besides, Harvard produces its graduates because they can be picky on who they can admit. Why would we assume that Harvard can scale to provide a "Harvard education" to someone who didn't qualify to make it in today?
Harvard is a private institution that is widely funded by government-backed loans.
They are also a "non-profit" and so don't pay property taxes even though they have a ludicrously-sized endowment fund which certainly accrues a lot of "profit".
Re: It’s Time to Build
#49It’s great to see this passion and sentiment. I wholeheartedly agree. In my opinion, the deficiencies that the pandemic is unmasking in the american system need a political solution and change. Looking for heroic activism isn’t going to fix the systemic issues. The left starts out with a stronger bias toward the public sector in many of these areas. To which I say, prove the superior model! Look to the European democ…
I don’t think there is evidence of European governments being any more competent during this pandemic.
All of them started late but Germany seems to be on top of the situation. Singapore and Taiwan are much closer to them then the US.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think there is evidence of European governments being any more competent during this pandemic.
Certainly not all of them, but the German healthcare system has dealt extremely well. There is plenty of testing capacity, and plenty of ICU beds. Thanks to century old unified health insurance laws. Edit: Otto von Bismarck actually instituted the health insurance system of Germany, certainly not a socialist!
It's also hard to say just yet about how poorly the American system is failing.