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It’s Time to Build

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Re: It’s Time to Build

#521

Post by closeparen »

tekdude wrote: post #388

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…

Milton Friedman did his thing from a university founded by John D. Rockefeller in a Department of Economics that is now named for Kenneth C. Griffin of Citadel Securities. I think it's safe to say that capital does spend on its policy interests, and quite effectively.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#522

Post by fancyfish »

amasad wrote: post #321
worik wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a problem. Ten years is not long term. In the long term we are all dead. So we have to want to do these things for people who are not born yet and who will never pay us or pay us back or be able to even thank us. We have to do these things because these things are the right thing to do. That will decrease our wealth. Now please explain how capitalism can do that?

Having children will give you that incentive. People with no children will have higher time preference -- they prefer today's consumption over investment in the future. That's why I find a lot of the antinatalism of modern western culture to be concerning.

This. Before I had kids I was always just living in the moment, looking for ways to entertain myself. Not concerned with the climate, retirement, and other long-term ideas at all. Now, with three kids, I’ve really started thinking about the environment and making the world a better place for them to grow up in. I buy sustainable house supplies. I save more in my 401k.

The net impact of having three kids has been a net positive for the environment and society, I believe.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#523

Post by aianus »

amasad wrote: post #321
worik wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a problem. Ten years is not long term. In the long term we are all dead. So we have to want to do these things for people who are not born yet and who will never pay us or pay us back or be able to even thank us. We have to do these things because these things are the right thing to do. That will decrease our wealth. Now please explain how capitalism can do that?

Having children will give you that incentive. People with no children will have higher time preference -- they prefer today's consumption over investment in the future. That's why I find a lot of the antinatalism of modern western culture to be concerning.

> People with no children will have higher time preference -- they prefer today's consumption over investment in the future.

On the other hand, people with children have less resources to invest and are generally forced economically to prefer today's consumption (eg. feeding, clothing, transporting, schooling their kids today instead of buying solar panel stocks for tomorrow).

Re: It’s Time to Build

#524

Post by pennyintheslot »

The core problem is too much regulation and the associated bureaucracy and legal percussions that come with it.

Regulation is always presented as a tool to 'protect the public' but usually just serves to protect the wealth of the leading players.

Anything that is regulated moves into a state of deadlock and now most industries and our society as a whole are in this state. Most don't dare to do anything entrepreneurial, because there are legal percussions waiting for almost any meaningful economic activity you could initiate.

A highly mobile free market capitalistic system is a threat to those in power. They don't want more bold entrepreneurs who could compete and potentially endanger them. They want people who do their jobs 9-5 and then go home and watch TV.

If we want to move out of this society-wide paralysis, we need grassroots political movements who systemically disassemble the regulatory walls that have been built over decades and centuries.

People need to wake up to the fact that regulation isn't meant to serve them but is intended to keep them at the bottom. Because when the current market leaders of an industry rose to power, there was no regulation yet, which made their success possible in the first place.

If you argue that this is how things should be, namely that industries should only be unregulated in the beginning and then become regulated once you have a few dominant market players, it creates a big problem: It means that we carry a long tail of highly inefficient industries with us, because regulation makes new competition so much harder in these 'older industries'.

I think we can see that today with industries like mobile carriers for example. Basically an oligopoly which dictates prices and creates huge shareholder profits year after year.

Each industry is a pillar of society and we need to break open these 'older industries' which were heavily regulated and have them catch up to the status quo through new competition. That means going head to head against a lot of people who have a lot of capital at their disposal to prevent that from happening.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#525

Post by JamisonM »

The fact that this article completely flattens "the western world" into a single entity and denies the obvious political realities of that same western world by pretending that there is not an obvious political faction that is staunchly committed to maintaining the status quo as a matter of principle undermines the whole article right off the bat.

Again and again I am left to ask myself, if these are our leaders what is left but to despair?

Re: It’s Time to Build

#526

Post by nickysielicki »

KirinDave wrote: post #167

I find this essay to be extremely frustrating, and a good example of the attitude I've personally witnessed Andreessen have in the few interactions I've had with him directly. > 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, goo…

> 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.

Can you talk about this a bit? 73 de W9NLS

edit: It's AREDN. Awesome!

Re: It’s Time to Build

#527

Post by _marlowe_ »

tekdude wrote: post #388

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…

Jonathan Tepper wrote a great book about this, the Myth of Capitalism

Re: It’s Time to Build

#529

Post by akra »

sverhagen wrote: post #39
hasanas wrote: post #23

You can’t just solve everything by “building”. Build too much, and you end up with depleted resources, non-environmental solutions, and outdated artefacts. Recycling is surely an option, but it should be the fallback, not the default. While the current crisis could’ve been handled better, it is not at all badly handled. Nature is much stronger than us, and the fact that we are not totally screwed after over four mont…

He's saying build solutions, not just stuff, is he? So, you could build an environmentally sound solution to replace a polluting incumbent.

As I've gotten older I've realised that sometimes us trying to "build our way out of things" is often just "digging the hole deeper". Technology doesn't have all the answers unfortunately; I used to think so but as I've seen more I realise I was wrong. Someone's progress is someone else's nightmare quite often; especially in a system where capital (and therefore technological control) is concentrated in the hands of the few rich.

Anything you built has inputs, outputs and waste (this is the bad stuff that makes our lives worse and is subject to the problem of the commons) - it isn't an efficient process. Often benefit accrues to the person with money, and the waste goes to everyone else. Sure there are some nice solutions out there but on the whole we probably need less building than done today; and what we do build being much more targeted to society's benefit.

As an example I look at China and think - they build a lot of stuff but I wouldn't want to live there personally with the smog, pollution, bad environment, etc. I live in a nice part of the world but can see "progress" coming close to my door. Maybe I'm just getting cynical.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#530

Post by pennyintheslot »

zelly wrote: post #487

This was one of the best posts I've ever read. Thinking about printing it out and framing it. It's more inspirational than anything I've read, and it articulates the elephant-in-the-room problem we all know but aren't talking about. No one is innovating anymore. Everyone copies each other. Even in the YC crowd, every other thing is a dumb CRUD app or AI snake oil project that has been rehashed since the 80s. Where's…

Thanks for the post! Why be entrepreneurial if you can just put your money in the SP500 and watch it go to the moon thanks to unlimited QE? The current paradigm is being kept alive by the Gov with all tools it has at its disposal (QE, bailouts), while the right move would be to let it go bust and push the restart button. Making space for a new generation of entrepreneurs to pick up the pieces.
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