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It’s Time to Build

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Re: It’s Time to Build

#61

Post by MattGaiser »

kick wrote: post #27

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. It's interesting that he manages to say completely uncontroversial things, yet do so in such a way that even he finds them controversial. Is there a word for this phenomenon? Rew…

I don't have an issue with the ideas. I agree with many of them.

I just find it a bit absurd that one of the top 1000 people capable of putting them into action is telling other people to go do it while he spends his time investing in them.

Capital is obviously helpful and crucial for building companies, but he is obviously satisfied waiting for solutions to walk in the door rather than chasing them himself.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#62

Post by viraptor »

battery_cowboy wrote: post #10
jdhn wrote: post #3

While I'm pro nuclear power, at what point do we say that nuclear isn't the way to go? The cost of solar panels and batteries are declining every year, and you don't have to deal with the terrible stigma that nuclear power has. Sure, new reactors are "zero emission", but will people actually want them to be built?

I love nuclear power, I used to be a 'nuke' in the Navy, but it's not feasible at today's tech level. There's too great a risk of nuclear accident right now, even if it's very uncommon (risk = severity x probability, if severity is 10/10 then any probability is too high, IMO). Someday, if the financials are right (if profit margins are good enough), or if we need it more than ever (if profit margins don't matter), so…

What do you mean by severity being 10/10? The issues we had in recent times were fairly mild. As long as they're not hidden and acted on quickly, we seem to cope well. Sure, people die, but it seems like severity 10 only because it all happens in one go. Take the deaths from air pollution, resources transport, mining, production, etc. involved in coal/gas/solar/wind, and put them in one day at the same rate as we had reactor failures - that would seem even more "not feasible".

Re: It’s Time to Build

#63

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

> The problem is desire. We need to want these things. The problem is inertia.

I agreed with most of the essay until I got to this point, at which point I rolled my eyes and briefly skimmed the rest.

It's akin to people who say that the reason there are so many overweight people is that they lack willpower and motivation. Look at pictures from middle-America in the late 1940s - virtually everyone is thin, whereas today you basically the vast majority of a similar population is overweight-to-obese.

Did we all just magically lose willpower over the last 70 years? Of course not, there were huge structural changes over that time in lots of areas (design of our cities, rise of the automobile, industrialized food and agriculture, etc.) that caused the person with "average" willpower to become obese.

Similarly, it's not as though people have less "desire" than before. There are large structural changes, many of which Andreesen doesn't address at all, such as the forces that have led to so much inequality and a hollowing out of the US manufacturing capacity.

I don't fundamentally disagree with Andreesen's goals, but "try harder" is the sort of platitude that rarely brings about real societal change.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#64

Post by milansuk »

In the article, Marc doesn't mention software. Maybe software could eat the world faster too(probably will, since many companies starting communicate over the internet). But there is still a huge gap between developers and consumers. I'm wondering what he thinks about that? Also, I'm glad He mention Westworld, great show.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#65

Post by [deleted] »

zuhayeer wrote: post #5

"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?

[deleted]

Re: It’s Time to Build

#66

Post by cpursley »

jasonv wrote: post #13

Just today I was on Twitter reading a thread where they were dismissing Chomsky as a “neoliberal shill”. Couldn’t imagine how. The things we need to build will probably require deep involvement of the government, or at least the exit of cronyism and political wave bending on the part of the government. And the vision of a 20, 50 and 100 year plan. Not sure I see that in our immediate future, here in the US.

Sounds great! But how do we separate cronyism and government? More government?

Re: It’s Time to Build

#67

Post by PragmaticPulp »

trimbo wrote: post #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?

For better or worse, the United States government is deeply entangled with the financing of college educations. Much of the money flowing in to Harvard via tuitions is involved in government-related loans in one way or another.

The idea isn’t to make demands of how a private institution spends their money. The idea is to add conditions to government-sponsored loans such that they could only be used at institutions that meet specific criteria. If a university doesn’t meet the criteria, then we don’t give government-sponsored loans to attend that institution.

Harvard isn’t the best example of this idea, but consider how much better the student loan crisis could have been if we attached even minimal criteria that degrees must reasonably be associated with job placement and a minimum level of student earnings after graduation.

It’s not a great idea to let the government essentially funnel money into these institutions at large scale via student loans, then leave students entirely on the hook for consequences, without at least minimal expectations that the universities use this money wisely.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#68

Post by covidacct »

kortilla wrote: post #59
covidacct wrote: post #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…

That’s not an idea for building, that’s just an idea for the government getting more money. The government clearly doesn’t actually need the money when it cares to do something (based on the stimulus bill and the last decades of deficits).

From my original post:

Governments DID see this coming, both federal and state. California, at one time, was prepared for exactly this crisis. The 2008 financial crisis wiped out state budgets

Re: It’s Time to Build

#69

Post by tathougies »

multiplegeorges wrote: post #45
tathougies wrote: post #38

I 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.

Can you explain rather than simply state? Regulatory capture typically refers to regulations entrenching current players and increasing barriers to entry. By definition, less regulation, lowers barriers to entry of new participants. You surely cannot actually believe that no regulation increases barriers to entry of certain industries?

Re: It’s Time to Build

#70

Post by oxymoron »

I'm in the process of reading _Why Nation Fails_. The central thesis is that the rich and poor countries are separated by inclusive vs extractive institutions. The extractive institutions are characterised by elites that attempt to defend their own wealth and status by maintaining the status quo and resisting the creative destruction that may threaten that position.

It seems to resonate a bit here, when Marc speaks of things like regulatory capture. I heard a few years back that a US health insurance startup had to provide on the order of 6000 pages of documentation to be approved. No wonder that there hadn't been another provider for twenty years or so. It seems like some things are hard to build mostly because some people want it that way.

I can't help but think that there's a fundamental flaw in the American regulatory approach. From the European perspective, the US is sometimes viewed as some time of free market haven, but in practice it often turns out that the regulatory burden is much higher. The framework imposed on financial markets by the SEC and related authorities is on a whole different level in the US, and with higher complexity you a also get a larger surface area for special interests to make their mark.

Point being, why not write simpler laws and regulations and leave it to the courts to interpret what adheres to the spirit of it? With the barriers of entry gone, I think we'd see a renewed vitality to many ossified sectors.

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