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It’s Time to Build

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Re: It’s Time to Build

#471
Andreesen is wrong. We need a New Medieval era.

We need to go backwards. Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and 4chan aren't developing any new ideas. They need to be shut down. Appoint a non-Trump leader as King. Funnel the engineers into military roles. Castes need to come back. Let there be priests to sedate the masses.

Then society will lead itself to salvation.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#472
post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the recent outbreaks of viruses like this have originated from East Asia. I really wouldnt give much praise to the great governing elite that failed to prevent this in the first place, despite scientists telling them about it a long time ago.

Not only is that factually incorrect as the other user pointed out, but you may be surprised that more than half of the worlds population lives in this circle ( https://i.imgur.com/CK6aONG.jpg ), so the fact that a lot of diseases originate there isn't as surprising as you might think. Not to mention that diseases can break out everywhere, making the response to a pandemic significantly more important than trying to…

>factually incorrect

It's not. SARS is from China.

>not to mention that diseases can break out everywhere

>essentially a game of chance

It's 100% preventable. Just cut contact with wildlife that spreads these viruses.

I'm only correcting the fallacy of praising any goverment that fails to address the root causes of these problems.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#473
post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You separate democratic procedure from capital. This is why the Citizens United ruling was such a disastrous decision for the US. However, capital doesn't necessarily mean election wins or regulatory influence, even now. Bernie Sanders raised immense amounts of money, more than Joe Biden did, but Sanders still was not able to win out in most states. There's more to politics than money, though money can definitely rai…

> You separate democratic procedure from capital Uhm, that's very easy to say, but how is that even possible? Even here in Scandinavia, where money interests isn't as blatantly involved in politics as in the US, most of the media are aligned to corporate interests and vast amount of money are spend by corporations to fund and campaign for right-wing business parties and policies. Why would Biden need money in competi…

When voters in South Carolina go to vote, did they listen to money, to their own hearts, or to "the establishment"? In any case, they did not listen to capital. And this is one way that politics is separated from capital.

There can never be perfect separation, all of society is connected to all of its parts in tricky ways, but part of maximizing that separation is to discover and acknowledge where capital has control of democracy and come up with ways to separate. No ideal is achievable, we can only strive to improve.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#474
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is exactly how two of the biggest startups of the past 15 years - Airbnb and Uber - were built. Airbnb and Uber built products that were in a legal gray area. Lawmakers are still catching up to them.

Seems like a good approach to me. Imagine if they waited and we were still stuck with taxis.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#475
post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People don’t want one-world-gov Speak for yourself. I would personally love this. We’re long overdue for a one world government.

Imagine if a dictator rises to power, but this time s/he has power over the entire world.

They'd have to completely undermine the world government to turn it into a dictatorship, and get the countries underneath it to go along. Is that much easier than getting power over the entire world the old-fashioned way?

Re: It’s Time to Build

#476

Regulatory capture is indeed a major underlying cause of a lot of the issues, but who will actually do the political work to fight against it? Someone spent money to capture the regulations in the first place, through lobbying and campaign donations. Who will spend the money to lobby and donate for the cause of undoing that? The "builders"? No, their focus and limited capital is spent on whatever it is they are worki…

This is great observation and speculation on what could happen and where would it come from. I've had multiple conversations with top-10 VC firm partners during our unsuccessful pitches where one of the sticking points is 'unfair-advantage'. 'How can you lock $user_group/$partners into this transaction/partnership?' Peter Thiel: "Monopolies are a good thing for society... The opposite of perfect competition is monopo…

Most of the companies we fund are trying to go disrupt someone else's "dominant market position".

Re: It’s Time to Build

#477
post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People don’t want one-world-gov Speak for yourself. I would personally love this. We’re long overdue for a one world government.

Imagine if a dictator rises to power, but this time s/he has power over the entire world.

Imagine if there's a revolution, but it's world population - 1 this time.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also a failure to build. We just accept it as a given that courts take too long, judges are too lazy to get their opinions out in a timely manner and the legal profession too often gets fat fees for slow-walking legal proceedings when technology exists to make expeditious dispute resolution much faster. For example, I can think of no reason why we can't mandate that discovery must use electronic format unless…

Read "Why Courts Don't Work" by Richard Neeley, who used to be chief justice of the West Virginia supreme court. Courts don't work because a lot of people don't want them to work. If you could get a judgement in a week in a minor labor case, employers would have to obey labor law, for example.

See also https://www.amazon.com/Justice-Matters-Rescuing-system-twent...

Re: It’s Time to Build

#479
I love building things, especially new things. I've started to see over the years that while I've built many things, I've failed just as much to maintain them.

I think there may be a paradox underlying his point: while we need to build things, we also need to maintain things. If I have limited resources (e.g., time, money, land, materials, etc.), then if I choose to build something, I may be choosing to abandon (not maintain) something, or even to destroy that thing. I think this applies to businesses, apps, bridges, skyscrapers, and even relationships. If I start something new, it often replaces the old.

I believe we may struggle with this, because, while we crave new things, we get emotionally attached to old things. We get attached to the way we're able to see the SF Bay from our house and don't want anything blocking our view. We get attached to our expertise and comfort at coding in a specific language and don't want to learn yet another new language. We get attached to the way we've made cars day after day, year after year, and also to the juicy profits and lives that it has given us.

Also, I think a lot of business models rely more on the maintaining of things than they do the building of things (unless you consider maintaining some sort of (re)building, but I don't). Facebook built a platform and for the most part, while adding users, seems to maintain it and want to prevent others from taking their users. Someone who builds a nuclear power plant will probably spend a lot of money building it and therefore wants to "milk the asset" for as much as they can. Even the construction firm who builds the power plant probably has methods that they've practiced over the years, and wants to leverage the learning of those methods more so than learn new ones.

I still agree that we need to build new things, I just believe there are strong financial and emotional reasons for why we maintain old things.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#480
post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! Law = code. Law should be turned into code, and made available to everyone. A great current attempt is https://donotpay.com/

No, law is not code and it’s very important that it’s not code. Law is subject to interpretation, and that’s great. When bugs are discovered in law, they can be retroactively corrected.

Are bugs discovered and corrected faster today in law or in code?
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