161–170 of 1001 posts
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Why wouldn't we build the more efficient one in terms of resources?
Solar and wind are great, but they don't provide continuous power. We need them, and nuclear.
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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?
Presumably they are talking about how monopolies are hard to compete against, and that monopolies are a fairly common outcome of no regulation.
> ... The things we build in huge quantities, like computers and TVs, drop rapidly in price. The things we don’t, like housing, schools, and hospitals, skyrocket in price. What’s the American dream? The opportunity to have a home of your own, and a family you can provide for. We need to break the rapidly escalating price curves for housing, education, and healthcare, to make sure that every American can realize the d…
> Why aren’t we building Elon Musk’s “alien dreadnoughts” — giant, gleaming, state of the art factories producing every conceivable kind of product, at the highest possible quality and lowest possible cost — all throughout our country? Because we have few of the industrial titans which are required to spearhead that and round up (or possess) the necessary capital. This sort of outcome does not magically self-assemble…
One of the people capable of that would be... um.... him! Yet he wants us to demand that other people do it.
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Here's one teeny tiny example. They made a smart investment, to the tune of billions of dollars, in computer science. And not just for the past 30 years, but continuously for the past 100 years. That investment included a modest (6-7 figure, depending on how your count) investment in a project on digital libraries years before private capital caught on. The private investors were rewarded handsomely for their investm…
I still do not understand the logic. Let me put it straight. 1. US Government has unlimited funding, heck, it came up with 2 trillions _during last month alone_ with some financial alchemy which I don't fully understand. But clearly it's not starving. 2. US Government has kinda poor record producing tangible results during last 30 years, in terms of advancing science, housing, whatever. I mean, can CDC quickly figure…
I was perhaps too coy.
https://www.nsf.gov/discoveries/disc_summ.jsp?cntn_id=100660...
I'm not even sure what to say about maps.
This is, in fact, often a major question in game design too. When the problem space gets reduced to a score optimization problem(whether score in the context is "high score" or "maximizing some form of output" like HP damage), you often end up with degenerate solutions that involve a repetitive linear application of some technique. And when this appears in a competitive context, the game starts stagnating into a rote exercise of min-max, and other solution sets go unexplored. Competitive players often look for ways to gatekeep and declare a playstyle unacceptable so that they stay in their comfort zone and keep their status - but acceptability is ultimately a matter of what you believe the competition is or should be about. If you don't have that agreement of shared belief, the game itself falls into incoherence, and that is what we see at a broader scale in society where its systems fail.
But there are some answers. One is to enforce a broad set of all-or-nothing contractual failure modes: If you fail the minimums you don't get the maximum. At a baseline we have Maslow's hierarchy of needs setting some of these minimums. And our legal system often works in this direction of adding a minimum. Another is to add buffers, delays and noise on results: If you don't have an instant guaranteed outcome, you can't push your margins nearly as hard, and so you don't end up in a distorted min-maxing zone, but a more systematic one, which can only be manipulated through careful synchronization that "gets ahead of" or "applies leverage" to the problem. This is something we're now dealing with increasingly in an interconnected "instant society" where continuous access is the norm and many activities that were one arduous and needed a strong commitment have been reduced and repackaged into status symbols. Lastly, overt market mechanisms - pricing and bidding and ownership - help when applied appropriately. But they are premised on active participation in the process, humans in the loop who can really think through all the factors. When we automate market activities, we end up back in the scenario of min-maxing.
Lots of fun things to think about. It's not just the building that matters, but the "why" of it. If you can justify the "why" you can get a lot farther.
> Is the problem capitalism? 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.
He argues that this is true, but then tries to make a central thesis that undercuts this declaration:
> The problem is desire. We need to want these things. The problem is inertia. We need to want these things more than we want to prevent these things. The problem is regulatory capture. We need to want new companies to build these things, even if incumbents don’t like it, even if only to force the incumbents to build these things. And the problem is will. We need to build these things.
This overlooks the fact that Marc is in fact one of these folks who has a profoundly outsized role in deciding what he wants. Like it or not, America follows in the moneyed aristocratic morals of the subjective theory of value. In some sense it is the function of concentrations of capital to assign value to things in America. Therefore, folks in control of lots of capital (e.g., Andreessen Horowitz and other venture firms) and their investors have a huge input into what "we want" as a nation. And yet here he is arguing that he feels like there isn't a national desire for these things.
We don't have it because building these things requires long term investments and folks like Marc and his investors are not interested in long term investments. America's corporate leadership has pursued elastic labor forces with minimal training (and therefore minimal flexibiity), outsourced manufacturing (and therefore long lead times on domestic production) and minimal redundancy in infrastructure because these rich folks think, plan and act on a quarterly calendar. We don't build new homes because homeowners like the value of their goods protected by intense scarcity. We don't compete with China because capital sees value in redundancy only with the framework of internal corporate prognostication, not as an actual net good when considered in a system
While many Americans like to pretend "capitalism" is synonymous with free market mechanics, that's actually false. Capitalism is a dominant force in America's future and the folks with all the power to assign value have been clear: their value lies in quarterly profits. Capitalism means that market competition is reduced and capital concentrates under a small number of collaborating actors.
I agree with Marc's core tenant that "we have to want these things." But I want these things. Hell, we're building grassroots infrastructure in my radio group because our capitalist-driven infrastructure is so antiquated we can't even do a software update to existing hardware without it taking 3 years and taking an entire flood warning system offline.
Marc and his investors have to want these things. They clearly don't. These things would have "taken care of strangers," perhaps, but folks like the people who invest in Marc's funds genuinely don't seem to believe they're worthwhile values. If you'll forgive the tired metaphor, the top 0.5% doesn't see value in these things so we don't have them. We even have some in that 0.5% paying incredible sums of money to run media org's who's entire purpose is to convince people they don't actually want their lives to be better!
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Getting an answer from a court (is X legal?) takes a long time: at least a few years and several hundred thousand dollars. Far too long to wait before building a business around X. Asking people to build the business first and then find out if it's legal isn't how a society of laws is supposed to work. Fast courts would be a huge benefit to society.
I also don't think you can just ask a court to answer a hypothetical in a binding way. You basically need to get into the legal problem first.
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Here's one teeny tiny example. They made a smart investment, to the tune of billions of dollars, in computer science. And not just for the past 30 years, but continuously for the past 100 years. That investment included a modest (6-7 figure, depending on how your count) investment in a project on digital libraries years before private capital caught on. The private investors were rewarded handsomely for their investm…
I still do not understand the logic. Let me put it straight. 1. US Government has unlimited funding, heck, it came up with 2 trillions _during last month alone_ with some financial alchemy which I don't fully understand. But clearly it's not starving. 2. US Government has kinda poor record producing tangible results during last 30 years, in terms of advancing science, housing, whatever. I mean, can CDC quickly figure…
Science is incremental, often is done with out clear end products, and value can only really be measured much later typically in terms of wide spread effect. Like the internet existed decades before everyone used the internet. And only because tax dollars supported it.
Thus if you want more output, they only true solution is to fund much more science than is funded today.
The USA has a system that makes it easier to appropriate wealth via rentier activity (for example becoming a landlord), than to create wealth (for example building accommodation).
Until this mentality changes you are going to see your living standards continue to plummet.
Rentier activity is a zero sum game. For you to win someone else has to lose. Making this a cornerstone of your economy is a disaster.