As a non-American, don't vote Joe Biden if you want sweeping changes. Shouldve considered the other Democrats candidates. Youll end up with same status quo
It’s Time to Build
561–570 of 1001 posts
Re: It’s Time to Build
#562This 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…
Your response is also printable/framable. > Where's the thorium reactors? Why does it still take 3 days to wire money? Where's the brain-computer interface? I never imagined people would be so lazy in the future. The idea of passive investment in an index fund has analogized to every part of our culture. We have come to expect things to magically grow on their own without any effort. Amen.
Not "where's the thorium reactors?" That probably won't work. But why don't we have rows of windmills from the Texas panhandle to the Canadian border (the real US wind belt), and EHV DC lines west to California, east to Chicago, and south to Houston. That could power the US west of the Mississippi. Totally do-able. Proven technology. Profitable.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#563> 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."
He could be referring to Trump’s disbanding of the pandemic protection team within CDC two years back
Re: It’s Time to Build
#564This 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…
If you are interested, Peter Thiel's 0 to 1 has more on this and with more depth. As he says, we are the "indefinite optimists", expecting the future to become better somehow, rather than "definite optimists" that expect to build the better future.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#565Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Regulatory capture is indeed a major underlying cause of a lot of the issues How is it even possible to isolate capitalism from regulatory capture? Capital accumulation inherently creates power and influence, so regulatory capture is surely just the perfectly logical second phase?
Now I can't speak for other government systems around the world, but here in Australia a big step forward would be as simple as having open and transparent government. Currently we have a Federal Government that loves slapping 'secret and confidential' stickers on as many of it's documents, just to keep them secret. Add to that they spends large amounts of time, money and effort fighting to keep these details secret…
Reading the Wikipedia article, the lack of government transparency is crappy, but I don’t blame the tunnel company for asking the government what their plans were for the existing roads. You can’t build a traffic tunnel on the hope that people use it.
You’d need to figure out what’s happening with the rest of the roads, then make a call to build or not. If the plans for the other roads change, the value of your tunnel might go to zero.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#566Earlier 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.
The failure of Lidl in Norway due to vested interests is an argument for one world government.
Maybe if we had one government we’d finally be able to settle on one electrical plug, which side of the road to drive on etc. etc. Imagine if every country developed its own indigenous WiFi standard? How lovely, until you want to read your email.
Charm and uniqueness is great on a postcard, but not when you want to actually achieve anything IRL.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#567Earlier 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…
Isn't Uber kind of the opposite kind of building the OP refers to? Uber externalizes so many costs to its drivers. It relies on someone else's healthcare system to care for its drivers. Someone else to pay to maintain the cars. So far the gig economy is maybe, half building something which has potential social benefit,half building something which clearly does not. Now, if Uber was lobbying hard for universal healthc…
The only thing uber has built really, is a way to extract more money from workers with less overhead while circumventing existing worker protection by acting as if they were just the messenger between customers and drivers.
I have the feeling that the real building of the past two decades lies in ever cleverer bussines schemes focused on lock ins, extracting user data, doing as if you are open while there is no practical way anybody could take what you did in any significant way and improve on it. The exiting things always seem to happen outside of that space however.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Markets build in response to incentives. Most American production choices are determined by markets, including the choices of investors allocating capital. This leaves out the most important problem though: regulatory capture and bureaucratic gridlock. Markets would love to build more housing. But they're prevented from doing so by the regulatory state. Markets would love to build nuclear power plants, but they're…
Sure, policy matters. It's important to have people in public leadership who understand it and can work on tuning it to avoid or eliminate unintended consequences. But complaining about either regulation or bureaucracy at a general level is the policy equivalent of approaching software by making general complaints about how terrible existing code is: sure, some of it is probably sub-optimal and should be rewritten, b…
> But complaining about either regulation or bureaucracy at a general level is the policy equivalent of approaching software by making general complaints about how terrible existing code is: sure, some of it is probably sub-optimal and should be rewritten, but anyone who's worked in the field for a while knows that the sweep-it-away/ground-up-rewrite impulse is more often wrong than applying Chesterton's fence (make sure you understand why it's there), profiling, and examine potential alternatives against studied outcomes.
This is sometimes true, but it certainly isn't always true. Housing policy, for instance, is largely driven by putting the interests of local property owners over those of new entrants and the broader economy.
> Sure. And would love to chase the wealthiest end of demand and externalize costs of community displacement or ecological impact.
Price the externalities. It's as simple as that. Nobody needs to externalize anything. Housing is plenty worth building to developers even if they fully internalize the ecological impact. And let's not neglect the ecological impact of long commutes when running this calculation.
> And would love to externalize the costs of risk and waste management.
Of course they'd like to do that. Everyone would like to externalize their costs and risks. The job of government is to let people do things, but force them to internalize the costs. You aren't making an argument against anything I said.
> They're arguments about specific incentives absent intentional oversight, supporting the general case that it is often irresponsible to believe or advocate that incentives tend towards optimal on their own, and that the primary problem is oversight itself.
Oversight is fine. Kafkaesque bureacracy and cost disease are not. The present state of our regulatory apparatus is abysmal. That isn't an argument for eliminating it, it's an argument for making it better.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
As the parent notes. The issue is if you have a simple law say "Do not dump harmful chemicals into waterways used for drinking, shipping, etc." this leads to a lot of litigation regarding what is a "harmful chemical". If instead you have it all spelled out "harmful chemicals being one of coal ash, hydrochloric acid, asbestos, ..." (don't quote me on these). Business's know what the variables/costs effecting operation…
I think the modern US version is different: A federal 3 letter agency unilaterally writes detailed regulations, that are for practical purposes law. One problem is that the regulatory agency gets captured by the industry, which means the regulation ends up being a way for the established industries and companies to make competition unfeasible.
The regulatory capture conversation from the likes of pmarca is always about advocating reduction of regulation because otherwise the regulator starts working in favor of the big guys against the little guys. But to me that is the wrong way to look at regulatory capture. The antiregulation politicians are the ones that tend to put big business lobbyists in charge of regulation. We need good regulation, not less. Good regulation that evens the competitive playing field and protects exploitation of externalities. without regulation the bug guys lock in the rents with no space for competition. We need good regulation. But you don't vote for the antiregulation guy to get good regulation, he's trying to destroy regulation not improve it. Less government is a red herring, we need better government.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Regulatory capture is indeed a major underlying cause of a lot of the issues How is it even possible to isolate capitalism from regulatory capture? Capital accumulation inherently creates power and influence, so regulatory capture is surely just the perfectly logical second phase?
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…
I think separating the two is harder than it seems. A big part of government work is economic in nature, so there inevitably is overlap between the two.