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It’s Time to Build

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Re: It’s Time to Build

#741

Post by ianleeclark »

usaar333 wrote: post #183
car wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly not all of them, but the German healthcare system has dealt extremely well. There is plenty of testing capacity, and plenty of ICU beds. Thanks to century old unified health insurance laws. Edit: Otto von Bismarck actually instituted the health insurance system of Germany, certainly not a socialist!

The republican stronghold of Texas has one of the lowest covid deaths per capita in the United States, better than even California (which is doing relatively well). Deaths per capita at 16/million is lower than almost anywhere in Western Europe. It's not obvious to me at all you can make a political judgement from covid19.

Texas hasn't even broken 200k tests, but Germany can do that in a week. Texas has bad data.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#742

Post by jussij »

refurb wrote: post #565
jussij wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tunne…

> You can’t build a traffic tunnel on the hope that people use it.

What you are describing is a level of planning and in this case I seriously doubt this project was planned.

The only reason I brought up this one particular example is I still remember it very clearly.

I'd walk home from work and I was constantly amazed as to how bad the traffic would flowed. Every street was full of cars and on many occasions I'd notice I was actually walking faster than the cars on the street (i.e. I'd see the same car at multiple intersections as I along the street).

But on the day the tunnel opening all that changed and the traffic turn from walking pace to gridlock.

The road closure had created a situation where now no cars where moving.

Prior to the tunnel, the driving public had faced 40+ minute traffic delays trying to get out of the city but after the opening that delay jumped to 1.5 hours.

So obviously, who ever signed off on those road changes was never acting on the best interest of the driving public.

If they had been working on some sort of plan on improving the traffic flows they failed miserably.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#743

Post by mengwong »

pmarca wrote: post #480
dodobirdlord wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Things are happening at the bleeding edge of computational law that move this debate into new territory.

(TL;DR: yes, "law is code". And $10M of fresh funding says law should be open-source code, to be precise. Hackers wanted.)

Background: the "Rules as Code" movement is bringing software engineering practices to the drafting of law. https://govinsider.asia/inclusive-gov/four-things-you-should...

The premise: the judiciary is one source of authority; the legislature is another. If we treat contracts and laws as executable programs and specifications, we want to find bugs at compile time, because handling exceptions at run-time is called "going to court".

How do we find bugs at compile time? Static analysis. Formal methods. Formal verification methodologies (Lamport's TLA+, MIT's Alloy) applied to contracts and laws make it possible to SAT-solve for loopholes ("sploits") that violate LTL/CTL specifications. Once law is code you can go full white-hat/black-hat. Automate the fuzzing. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/09/savin...

Maybe we don't always want "law as code" ... for, say, criminal law. Judicial discretion is important. Human judgement matters. Though if an overworked public defender can only spare two hours out of the hundred you deserve, the robolawyer starts to sound more attractive. What if we send Watson to law school? If you're hunting for a way to stay out of jail, wouldn't you want Deep Blue and AlphaGo to help you find it? https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/01/31/us/public-def...

There are plenty of black-and-white areas where the rules don't invite human interpretation: mostly things to do with finances -- like how DoNotPay.com can help apply for unemployment. Even in those domains, there are deep, deep pockets lobbying against the kinds of freedom (as in speech, and as in beer) that "law as code" promises. https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-turbotax-20-year-f...

But, you ask, what about the knowledge acquisition bottleneck? Ah, yes, the AI Winter. Ontologies (SUMO, OWL, UFO-L), visual modeling notations (BPMN, DMN), and a new generation of tools (Flora-2, Protégé) take a new whack at that problem without going anywhere near machine learning and neural nets, which typically lack the nuance you need when every comma counts. https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180723-the-commas-tha...

Spring is coming. The vision for computable law, as laid out by Michael Genesereth at Stanford's CodeX Center, is for software that does for legal reasoning what the spreadsheet does for quantitative reasoning. (Who's Michael Genesereth? You've heard of Russell & Norvig's textbook on AI. He was Stuart Russell's Ph.D advisor.) https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1165485.1165517

Is there any money in this? Hell, yes. In the US, DoNotPay is running a pitch-perfect Christensen disruption playbook. Outside the US, the EU has issued a half-million-euro tender for exactly the Rules As Code thing mentioned above: machine-readable-and-executable regulations. See section 1.4.2 of the PDF at https://etendering.ted.europa.eu/document/document-old-versi...

Oh, and as of last month, Singapore has just thrown $10M behind a project to turn the "law as code" vision into open source software that you can clone off Github.

I've been researching computational law since 2015, and a picture of the future legal tech stack is coming together in my head: open-source, open-standards, laws and contracts drafted in a domain-specific language from the start; libraries of clauses, linters and interpreters and unit testers and theorem provers built into the IDE, that find bugs in contracts in real time as you edit; compilers to English and other languages; model-driven architectures that flow from the specification to the app.

Once that legal stack is downloadable and accessible to the geeks of the world, then, as Joshua Browder would say, DoNotPay a law firm thousands of dollars just to copy and paste a Word doc out of their library. The law firm is not the customer -- as Atrium proved, expensively.

To help move this stack out of my head and into Github, the SG government is funding the development of open-source software targeted to real-world use cases, for drafting rules and contracts in a DSL. They've approved a grant for my small team (hi, Alexis! https://www.thetechnolawgist.com/2020/03/31/legalese-singapo...

(Why Singapore? Fun fact: it's the only country in the world whose prime minister has degrees in mathematics and computer science.) https://twitter.com/leehsienloong/status/595166789660647426?...

If you're in a position to move to Singapore (whenever air travel reboots) ... and have skills in obscure but powerful technologies (or want to gain those skills) ... and want to help design a language that could be the basis for the next iteration of the legal industry ... we're hiring: https://computational.law/hiring

Re: It’s Time to Build

#744

Post by thu2111 »

KirinDave wrote: post #179
oxymoron wrote: post #70

I'm in the process of reading _Why Nation Fails_. The central thesis is that the rich and poor countries are separated by inclusive vs extractive institutions. The extractive institutions are characterised by elites that attempt to defend their own wealth and status by maintaining the status quo and resisting the creative destruction that may threaten that position. It seems to resonate a bit here, when Marc speaks o…

> It seems to resonate a bit here, when Marc speaks of things like regulatory capture. I heard a few years back that a US health insurance startup had to provide on the order of 6000 pages of documentation to be approved. No wonder that there hadn't been another provider for twenty years or so. It seems like some things are hard to build mostly because some people want it that way. Sure, but is this actually a high o…

We're actually not running out of ventilators anywhere. Existing installed base is sufficient and moreover, it turned out the federal government had a large stockpile anyway, which rather invalidates the central thesis of the article re: lack of preparedness.

The claim about ventilators was one of the first dodgy claims I noticed but really the entire first part of the article is a pack of lies. Andreessen says:

"We see this today with the things we urgently need but don’t have. We don’t have enough coronavirus tests, or test materials — including, amazingly, cotton swabs and common reagents"

This isn't amazing. The amount of testing being performed has scaled exponentially over the space of just a few months, from a standing start. In fact there's a lot of evidence that the supposedly exponential growth of the virus was really due to an exponential growth in testing, when positives are viewed as a proportion of overall tests done. It's not an indictment of "the West" that materials run out after such a vast acceleration - if anything I'm amazed it didn't happen earlier!

"We don’t have enough ventilators, negative pressure rooms, and ICU beds"

All three are in plentiful supply. Even in localised hotspots like New York problems are limited to a handful of hospitals.

I've been reading about the near deserted state of most hospitals for over a week now. I don't understand where Marc is getting his information from if he isn't aware of this.

"We also don’t have therapies or a vaccine — despite, again, years of advance warning about bat-borne coronaviruses"

Vaccines can't be created for a virus that doesn't exist yet regardless of how many vague warnings there are, so this isn't remarkable: it's inevitable. As for therapies, that's what ventilators and CPAP are.

"then we may not have the manufacturing factories required to scale their production"

Given the data appearing in a flood of new papers, showing that the virus is not dangerous enough to warrant current policy, no unusual rates of manufacturing scale-up will be required.

"it took scientists 5 years to get regulatory testing approval for the new Ebola vaccine after that scourge’s 2014 outbreak, at the cost of many lives"

I'm actually on Marc's side on this one, in that I suspect current FDA approval processes are overkill. But this claim is also nonsense. FDA allows fast-track approval bypass for cases where someone is going to die without treatment anyway, and Ebola disappeared after 2014 - according to CDC the next time it was spotted was Zaire in 2018 with a grand total of 8 cases. That's not even close to "many lives".

"A government that collects money from all its citizens and businesses each year has never built a system to distribute money to us when it’s needed most."

Tax credits, quantitative easing, loan subsidies. The government has many ways to distribute money to people.

"At least therapies and vaccines are hard! Making masks and transferring money are not hard"

In fact making medical masks is hard. It requires special materials and machines, the supply of which can't be rapidly scaled up.

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-factories-cant-keep-up-d...

Headline is literally "Factories are scrambling to make 20 times more face masks a day to keep up with demand amid coronavirus outbreak, but the masks are surprisingly difficult and expensive to make"

As for money, transferring money is easy. Figuring out the right amounts and the right people to send it to, without creating an explosion of fraud and waste - that's not so easy.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#745

Post by kimsant »

Workforce is like energy, difficult to store.

Boomers did build a lot because they needed a way to store this workforce, and building is the way. Capital was short and workforce abundant.

Now it's changing, we have lots of goods and savings to invest, but nobody to take them and actually DO something. Now is time to make sure that people that can create something actually do it. Interest rates are super low, and the economies are flooded with money.

What's the problem here. ZOMBIES! ZOMBIE companies that just drag resources and never die. If you don't let them fall and you never restructure the system gets sick. And that's what happens now, saving everyone ass is not clever, but printed money is going to those holes.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#746

Post by xchaotic »

john_minsk wrote: post #684
oxymoron wrote: post #70

I'm in the process of reading _Why Nation Fails_. The central thesis is that the rich and poor countries are separated by inclusive vs extractive institutions. The extractive institutions are characterised by elites that attempt to defend their own wealth and status by maintaining the status quo and resisting the creative destruction that may threaten that position. It seems to resonate a bit here, when Marc speaks o…

And what would it solve? If you can enter the market but later on you are judged in the court for doing something wrong - you are better to be forced to think about it before you even start it. The problem here is growing complexity, which governments doesn't recognize as a problem for some reason. There should be some institution in the government body, which primary goal would be to reduce complexity of governance.

Funny enough, adding such role/institution adds complexity in itself

Re: It’s Time to Build

#747

Post by fierarul »

chriswphoto wrote: post #450
buss wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In San Francisco, at least, YIMBY is the organization that is organized around ending regulatory capture in housing, and The Neoliberal Project (in SF YIMBY Neoliberal) is organized around broader dismantling of regulatory capture. We mobilize people in support of reform-focused politicians and have even started running our own (Sonja Trauss in 2018 and myself in 2020). Happy to talk more about it -- steven.buss@gmai…

Thank you for the work you do! Zoning is the new redlining. This generation has to fight for the right to affordable housing and economic opportunity.

I find it interesting how affordable housing must be very near high economic opportunity.

Seems to me it's a fight for convenience too.

They built Las Vegas in the desert to avoid restrictions, what's preventing this generation to build new cities?

The whole Covid problem will make quests to increase population density more difficult. But perhaps will also spread opportunities around, or move them online, so this zoning struggle will stop being important.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#749

Post by kimsant »

benjaminwootton wrote: post #613
pennyintheslot wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe like many things the OPs post is an indirect consequence of 2008 bailouts and QE. Zombies were propped up so the only thing entrepreneurs could go after was CRUD apps and adtech. If banks, airlines, manufacturing were forced to face that reset then entrepreneurs and startups could have a go at genuinely reinventing those industries.

You are right, congrats. Just found the comment by searching the word zombie, is a cool thing to do.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#750

Post by PaulHoule »

Marc has to accept some responsibility for this as the decisions by himself and his industry for 20 years have been part of the problem.

Building more housing in the Bay area is not part of the solution. What is part of the solution is funding business activity elsewhere, where people are not packed in like sardines and breeding viruses.

Note it does show that the VCs are not a master class because they can't win against bay area landlords. If the ground in the Bay area is so uniquely blessed that is a case for sky-high property taxes, right?

I want to see salesforce, Apple's and similar companies ditch the Moscone center and move their conferences to Las Vegas for one thing.

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