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It’s Time to Build

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Re: It’s Time to Build

#821

Post by ed405 »

I’m a founder, this piece stirs my heart.

However, build what exactly? I don’t disagree with building hospitals and important public infrastructure. However:

1) More exponential growth isn’t by definition for the better 2) We need to ask ourselves, brutally and honestly, what actually needs building, and what doesn’t?

Aside from the obvious tangible tech and infrastructure we can build, there are also many tacit things we should be building and investing in, but that are difficult to measure: International cooperation, resilience, creativity.

There’s no point in building more infrastructure (Andreessen) or trying to populate other planets (Musk), if we continue having paralyzing social inequality and international conflict, which destroy what we build. ️

Re: It’s Time to Build

#822

Post by bsanr2 »

pascalxus wrote: post #368
treis wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. It's like it was written to be the perfect example of SV myopia for the rest of the world. Some examples: >Even private universities like Harvard are lavished with public funding; why can’t 100,000 or 1 million students a year attend Harvard?…

>>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…

Which bus venture was it?

The devil is in the detail with these things, and I think the point is that, while regulatory capture is a huge problem, there are often legitimate and/or competing interests calling for these regulations to be put in place. Builders don't necessarily like every code they have to adhere to, but that keeps houses from collapsing.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#823

Post by ausbah »

pcj-github wrote: post #802

Did anyone else come away with this article thinking Marc Andressen is overrated and completely out of touch?

I partially did. I think the article puts its finger on the main "pulse" of the general problem most people feel with American, perhaps more broadly Western, society- but doesn't offer anything more substantive then a vague "call to action"

if I had to make succinct guess to this "general problem" - I'd wager simply that most people feel like our current institutions are failing to meet most of their needs, and there doesn't appear to be any sense that these problems will be readily addressed anytime soon

Re: It’s Time to Build

#824

Post by GuiA »

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.

Can you murder your competitors in this 1 square mile? Can you steal their inventory? Can you hijack their equipment? Can you threaten their employees? Can you force your employees to work overtime till they drop? Can you dump all your industrial waste wherever you want in that 1 square mile? What about animal/human testing?

That was not much more than one second of thinking but that’s about what this idea deserves.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#825

Post by e12e »

KirinDave wrote: post #787
e12e wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> You see it in transportation. (...) Where are the high speed trains > none of this stuff is economically or physically practical. One of those things are not like the others.

Are you seriously suggesting the trains are not economically practical? China, India, Europe and the UK all would like to have a word with you.

No, the opposite. Gp mentions fast trains in the same breath as flying cars and supersonic passenger planes.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#826

Post by eli_gottlieb »

pmarca wrote: post #382
solidasparagus wrote: post #203

Well Marc, one problem is the world of VC-driven innovation. Building truly revolutionary work takes time and commitment, while the VC ecosystem and entrepreneurial culture actively works against this. - Telling founders to be underpaid and commit their entire finances to the success of their startups forces startups to spend more time finding product-market fit than building what the world needs long-term. - Hiring…

Fortunately, VCs have no regulatory protection whatsoever. Build a better way to finance innovation!

You may be interested in Vannevar Bush's ideas on this matter from 1945. https://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/nsf50/vbush1945.htm

Re: It’s Time to Build

#827

Post by eli_gottlieb »

nopriorarrests wrote: post #76
covidacct wrote: post #46

> I expect this essay to be the target of criticism. Here’s a modest proposal to my critics. Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own! What do you think we should build? There’s an excellent chance I’ll agree with you. What we need to build is the capacity to make investments in building backstops against low-prob, high-risk, collective risks. For almost all of those risks, the problem isn't…

Honest, no snark question -- what exactly US government did in last 30 years that should warrant providing more money to it? Is there any guarantee that another trillion dollars will be used more efficiently than blowing up another Middle East country?

Well, there were those research efforts that came close to a SARS vaccine until their funding got cut: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/scientists-were-c...

By the way, the formal name for COVID-19's virus is SARS-COV-2.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#828

Post by pbourke »

Thriptic wrote: post #771
pbourke wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Key to their strategy was having deep enough pockets to fight many simultaneous legal and PR battles.

Key to their strategy was actually providing the public with something most people actually wanted, regardless of legality. Very few lawmakers want to aggressively go against public sentiment just because the law says they should.

> Key to their strategy was actually providing the public with something most people actually wanted

The people who want the service are not necessarily the same as the people who are affected by the externalities of the service.

Everyone loves having AirBnb available to expand selection in NYC when they visit, but how many New Yorkers who aren’t AirBnb hosts love having tons of short term rentals in their building?

Re: It’s Time to Build

#829

Post by jeremyjh »

roenxi wrote: post #758
etrabroline wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>GOP put party win before a nation by agreeing to nominate an unfit individual for office. They failed as gatekeepers. Trump won the primary because he took positions that closely follow the article being discussed here, anti-war, anti-outsourcing (additionally he took an anti-immigration position) while all of the other 18 GOP candidates had the same pro-war, pro-free trade, pro-immigration positions that the party…

> but that would mean ending the middle eastern wars Do you want the terrorists to win? >:| It is a remarkable bellweather of US politics that despite being a relatively peaceful polity the voting public have been unable to drag the country out of a permanent state of expensive and wasteful war. I think both Trump and Obama campaigned as pro-peace candidates so it is a presumably a popular position with voters. US fo…

> raising a generation Middle Easterners with excellent motivation to hate America seems like a foolish long term strategy

We've been doing that since the 1940s. At this point, it is part of our national identity that we cannot even question.

Re: It’s Time to Build

#830

Post by KirinDave »

pdonis wrote: post #432
CodeMage wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find this essay to be extremely frustrating Thanks, I was worried I would find HN readers to be largely in agreement with it and I'm glad I was wrong about that. I also find that "we need to want these things" is the key problem with the article. I agree with your conclusions, but I think you've understated the case a bit. I believe that all of this has happened the way it happened because we live in a society --…

> This is what you get when you build your whole system around the optimization of one variable -- profit -- and put essentially religious faith into the unproven idea that the Invisible Hand of the Market will make everything work. But this isn't what the whole US system is built around. That's (at least part of) the problem. As others have pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, many of the things Andreessen says…

> But this isn't what the whole US system is built around. That's (at least part of) the problem. As others have pointed out elsewhere in this discussion, many of the things Andreessen says he thinks we need to build are thinks that the free market would like to build, but can't because of legal and regulatory barriers.

Really? Which thing? I haven't really been sold a narrative that "regulatory barriers" are in the way of securing domestic manufacturing capacity or building high speed rail. It's securing the initial and sustained capital to build the systems.

> That said, it is true that free markets are a tool, not an end in themselves. Free markets can help you to provide goods and services as efficiently as possible, but they can't tell you which goods and services should be provided and which should not. So free markets on their own are not enough to have a good society.

Folks misinterpret the literature around free markets all the time. They do not make guarantees of efficiency. Neither does centrally planned economies. The idea that either one is inherently more efficient is the legacy of various propaganda campaigns.

> So free markets on their own are not enough to have a good society.

All that said, I do agree strongly that this is true. To some extent, no system inherently promises this. It's just that some systems guarantee equity cannot be sustained (e.g., capitalism or despotism).

As long as American society implicitly believes in the Hayek-ian notion that freedom exists to empower the hypothetical Galt's that they dream exist and imagine that America's moneyed aristocracy serves an important function of assigning value simply by virtue of their spending, no among of free marketspace will fix our problem. Folks have been duped into buying into a scheme where they think they need aristocracy to survive.

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