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It’s Time to Build

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Re: It’s Time to Build

#531

Post by eli_gottlieb »

jbverschoor wrote: post #227

What's the goal here? The American dream? Well, you need to be able to afford a home and children. People can't. Why not? Because they aren't paid enough for the work they do. The money is being made, but it ends up at the top, and not even corporate tax is being paid with all the tax optimization routes. So what do people do? They begin startups. Most of the time they're done by people who should even waste their ti…

>Want more R&D? Pay "smart" people more, instead of forcing them to try and do the startup.

... having found that I can attack problems which are 10x harder in academia, as a lowly PhD student, than I was ever allowed to come close to touching in industry, because I didn't have both a PhD and my own company...

Yeah. I would never claim I've done particularly great or world-changing research so far (all my conference papers get rejected, after all), but nonetheless, I definitely think I make more contribution to society overall working on, say, applying Bayesian deep learning to study individual differences in neuroimaging than, say, doing web apps for sports teams or embedded firmware for a product that gets canceled (my previous two jobs).

And I definitely contribute more to society working on the derp larnin' for neuro-imaging than I did when I was unemployed and getting turned down for ML engineer jobs because I hadn't done enough ML before and the stars didn't align my way.

Arrange the money so that it pays to throw smart people at hard, useful problems.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#533

Post by yellow_postit »

Klinky wrote: post #502
pascalxus wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>You see it in transportation. Where are the supersonic aircraft? Where are the millions of delivery drones? Where are the high speed trains, the soaring monorails, the hyperloops, and yes, the flying cars? >Because none of this stuff is economically or physically practical. He seems to want us to live in a science fiction fantasy world. I'm pretty sure most of that stuff is highly illegal. Make things illegal, and…

Supersonic flight is inefficient and noisy. Drones are noisy, a hazard, and significantly more limited due to lithium density than electric cars. High-speed rail is not illegal, but requires huge capital. Uber may not be economically viable, and there are serious concerns about middle-men marketplace corps socializing the liability, benefits, and wage instability costs the gig economy brings with it.

Cars are noisy, a hazard, and in some ways significantly more limited than horses.

I actually agree with all your points but also recognize there’s a strong prior bias toward what “I know” works or doesn’t today that can preclude the future possibilities.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#534

Post by anovikov »

Thing is, no society was prepared. You may name Singapore and Japan but after initial success, cases are now spiking there. You may name South Korea and that will be fair, but their success is a continuation of their failures (effectively they are have a techonology-driven totalitarianism, most Westerners would hate to live there, and this results in more pressing problems than there are in any Western country). Even if Russia that declared itself safe (for ridiculous explanations) initially, now has world's 3rd number of new cases daily and appears to be on track to become one of the worst hit countries - it wasn't preparedness, but rather a delay because of deep poverty and low mobility of post population there - so epidemic took a lot of time to get there.

No one was prepared. This is a black swan event, they happen once in a century. If you try to get prepared to every kind of them you'll spend more than if you just absorb the consequences. Trick isn't preparedness, but rather resilience, ability to get up and move on quickly.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#535

Post by UncleOxidant »

pascalxus wrote: post #378
avarun wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does this make any sense? You wrote this long, neatly articulated response, but your central premise is entirely flawed. Marc Andreessen and Andreessen Horowitz and other venture capitalists don't have a monopoly over the future (or current) direction of our society). Hell, they don't even have a plurality of control. The things that Marc speaks of in this article that are fundamentally broken in the US are housi…

This is exactly why we need innovation in politics. Imagine for a second, that you declare a region, say 1 square mile, somewhere as almost completely free of all regulations. Then, let all the companies that want to build there, go nuts and build whatever they want. This then serves as an innovation incubator, and an example for the rest of the nation as to what can be built, when we allow it to be built. Imagine th…

> Imagine for a second, that you declare a region, say 1 square mile, somewhere as almost completely free of all regulations

Any kind of pollution would be acceptable in this 1 square mile? Any kind of price manipulation? There wouldn't be any consumer protections? No worker protections?

Not all regulation is bad. A lot of it exists for good reasons because the profit motive tends to lead to abuses.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#536

Post by adrianN »

kebman wrote: post #428
Jommi wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great comment, and hopefully I could add some real life example around this, esp with 1) and 2). Uber did this in Europe. Uber pushed, fought and introduced gig-economy employment laws in every country it has operated in EU, specifically around taxi and for hire transport regulation. Uber employed a huge amount of legal and PR counsel to achieve this, with massive lobbying funding. And what has happened? It…

Nobody want's a new McDonald's destroying their old status quo in their country. People don't want one-world-gov. They want disparate nations, that have charm and local uniqueness. Except that goes directly towards harmonizing international (trade) laws. If you want a lesson, check out how Lidl did in Norway when they challenged local chain stores.

I think you're overgeneralizing "people". I for example would be in favor of world-government structures that have actual power.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#537

Post by infinitone »

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…

While i agree with a lot of your response. I also concede that regulatory capture is a serious innovation inhibitor that has a factor in some of your questions re: reactors, 3 days to wire money, etc. The incumbents have gotten too comfortable and lobbied well enough to protect themselves.

Then you also have the current bailouts of airlines, etc. So the incumbents in this case are too big to fail. You'll never get new entrants/innovators in these areas until those issues are solved.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#538

Post by eli_gottlieb »

harryh wrote: post #277
djcapelis wrote: post #238

> But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared This is silly. There are clear differences in response. Here’s just one example: 21 Jan - The city department of public health activates its operations center to prepare for a potential outbreak. 28 Jan - The city activates its emergency operations center. 25 Feb - The city formally declares a state of emergency to prep…

NYC and SF have roughly similar sized city budgets when measured on a per capita basis and they had _wildly_ different responses to Coronavirus. Whatever it was that causes such different responses, I don't think it was "political movements who want to drown government in a bathtub."

Yeah, it's fair to point out that both New York and San Francisco are thoroughly Democratic in their politics, and yet responded very differently to the crisis.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#539

Post by fratlas »

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…

  brain-computer interface
This one actually is being worked on, and it's a very hard problem. Great high level article of where we're at https://waitbutwhy.com/2017/04/neuralink.html

Re: It’s Time to Build

#540

Post by david927 »

fxtentacle wrote: post #141

The article chalks it up to a lack of desire, but that seems completely wrong to me. The sad truth is that building yet another addictive and attention-grabbing way to push ads into people's faces pays the bills. Doing the right thing does not, or at least not in America. As a German, it took me a while to figure out how business in the US works, but basically everyone only treats things listed next to a monetary amo…

You're right, America has long given up the notion of what is "for the good of society" in favor of making money. Walking around SF (until recently) meant literally seeing both millionaires and people defecating in the street. It's extreme.

Marc wants to know how to use capitalism and growth (building) to overcome this, when the best outcome might be just realizing how broken capitalism in America is.

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