Who is John Galt?
Please don't do this here.
It’s Time to Build
631–640 of 1001 posts
Re: It’s Time to Build
#632Earlier quoted context omitted.
Point being, why not write simpler laws and regulations and leave it to the courts to interpret what adheres to the spirit of it? With the barriers of entry gone, I think we'd see a renewed vitality to many ossified sectors. I agree with your overall point, but you have the regulatory differences between the US and Europe exactly backwards. Europe (excluding England somewhat) has a statutory legal system. Things are…
Yeah, but when the practice of this is different with it often being up to regulators what actually is allowed and what isn't. The obvious recent example is that GDPR enforcement is (often intentionally) not strictly following the letter of the law.
Well, GDPR is not actually a law, but a framework that must be used by EU member states to implement their own laws. That may be one cause of local enforcement being not fully aligned with GDPR.
But yes, the local GDPR laws do seem to be intentionally underspecified, like you said.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#633Earlier 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…
> 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 prevented from doing so by the regulatory state. I don’t like it when people anthropomorphize concepts like economic markets, but I _especially_ don’t like it when they do this to make it seem like the anthropomorphization should be a sympathetic charac…
> I don’t like it when people anthropomorphize concepts like economic markets, but I _especially_ don’t like it when they do this to make it seem like the anthropomorphization should be a sympathetic character to the reader.
> Like one of the GPs said, above: the market is something that responds to incentives.
What's your point? The incentives are aligned to build more housing. That's what high prices do, they incentivize supply.
> Regulation and bureaucracy shape those incentives, sometimes in the ways that you’re describing, but the market is just as “happy” to capitalize on bad housing regulation as it is to capitalize on a lack of any housing regulation at all.
So?
A) The point your making is irrelevant to mine. The fact that markets will exploit poor regulation is really neither here nor there.
B) The solution to the problem you pose is, just like what I said, better regulation.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#634I love the idea of building, but we also shouldn't lose sight of earth's limited resources.
We don't have unlimited land, and we need much of that for agriculture to sustain the billions of people living here.
When we use energy, we must make sure it comes from renewable sources.
When we build, we must take care that we don't destroy existing ecosystems. And so on.
And since we cannot rely on everybody being responsible on their own, we need regulations. They should be as efficient and frictionless as possible, but let's not dismiss them all together in a frenzy to build, build, build.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#635Re: It’s Time to Build
#636Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Indigenous solutions typically develop differently for a reason. Building standards in a wet humid climate prone to flooding differ from those in the desert because they have different needs: if you make a standard set of guidelines that applies universally, it will inherently need to be more complicated than the guidelines adapted for a specific scenario. Part of the brilliance of the internet is the way things are…
Good points.
I think the regulatory equivalent of TCP/IP is probably some form federalism. There are many regional examples of this, to varying degrees. You want the minimum set of laws to provide the conditions for local human flourishing everywhere.
“If Australia has a different wifi standard than America, it doesn’t mean they can’t connect.” This would be great IRL! All digital protocols could be reduced to one; but then IRL is also made of physics, so I guess you’d need one physical standard too (USB-C is our obvious candidate), and one harmonised set of radio frequencies etc. It’s those physical properties that are hard to reduce to a virtualised layer.
Kind of impossible when it comes to driving on the wrong side of the road, unless you abstracted the interface in some kind of VR (so everyone is apparently driving however they please, while confirming to one physical standard).
Re: It’s Time to Build
#637Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I sympathise, but you don’t need one world government, just agreement and consensus between governments. That’s hard work though, it requires sacrifice and compromise, and recent history (Trump protectionism, Brexit) is against compromise or sacrifice.
Yeah, I guess what I envisage would be a very minimal federal government, rather than a central point of failure for decisions about every aspect of people’s lives. Very hard to get agreement at that scale though, as you say.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#638Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pract…
Ubër has also built a service that I, for one, strongly prefer to traditional transportation services. Customer experience is far superior.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#639Earlier quoted context omitted.
>All the recent outbreaks of viruses like this have originated from East Asia. That's not true. Swine flu came from Mexico and MERS, as the name implies, started in the Middle East
I do mean SARS which first surfaced in the 2000s in China. Swine flu has been around for much longer, at least for 100 years.
Having one example and phrasing it to sound like multiple is misleading, imo.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#640I'm quite sympathetic to a lot of what's in that blog post but... A16Z directly invests gobs of capital, and, indirectly, shapes the outlook of other VCs who follow their investment decisions, and they plow way more money into software/bitcoin than physical companies. Why? Because they are really good at what they do, and they realize that building physical stuff is really hard, and they'd rather invest in areas that…
That's a valid criticism and something that ran through my mind when reading the article. But keep in mind that there's orders of magnitude difference in what they invest vs. the federal government. According to these 2 articles, it could be around THREE orders of magnitude -- ~4 billion in for them in 2014 vs. ~4 trillion for the federal government. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreessen_Horowitz https://www.cbo.g…
With so much money earmarked for the military, how absurd would it be to create a "health force" alongside the Space Force?