VC Pitches in a Year or Two

Yes, and that's pretty much part of the problem.

I've commented before on how Kleiner Perkins' failure in cleantech is really sobering:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6997397

Actually, there was a whole post on the topic I seam to have missed "The Rent-Seeking Economy"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5548730

Source article: "Great Problems: The Rent-seeking Economy" http://intellectual-detox.com/2013/04/14/rent-seeking-econom... (Devin Finbarr)

I see financialization, increasing advertising focus (much of which is supported by ... wait for it ... the FIRE industries[1], and "software eats everything", all as elements of catabolic collapse[2]. They're extracting financial value from the economy and transferring that financial wealth, which changes who holds real physical wealth, but doesn't much increase it.

Finbarr's blog piece explores this in much greater detail.

The focus of Silicon Valley over the past decade and more on ephemera and trivialities is very much part of the problem. The fact that the only remunerative opportunities for talent are in the FIRE and social / advertising / gaming industries is not a good thing. And the fact that even VC with long track records of success in technological application fail when trying to operate in the Greentech / alternative space is should be read as exceptionally cautionary.

Yes, there's good news out there. Elon Musk is doing fascinating things with Tesla. Solar is absolutely exploding -- in the past two years, solar generation in the US hasn't merely increased, hasn't doubled, but is up seven times[3]. That's a rate of growth which, if sustained, would have solar being half of all electric generation within a decade. I'm skeptical that the rate of growth can continue, but even if it moderates significantly, doubling times of a year or two can grow a small base hugely, and we need all the help here we can get.

But I really wish that the hacker community would pull its collective head out of its collective ass on occasion and look around at what problems should be solved. And a choking off of the backbone for new trivial ventures really could be a powerful refocusing mechanism, all snark aside.

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Notes:

1. "What Are The 20 Most Expensive Keyword Categories In Google AdWords?" http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/18/most-expensive-google-adwor...

2. "How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse" http://www.indiana.edu/~workshop/colloquia/materials/papers/...

3. EIA: "Table 7.2a Electricity Net Generation: Total (All Sectors)" http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec7_5.pdf

All this could be changed if you let Congress have another shot at the classifications, but you really don't want that. The forces that made telephone regulation the morass that it is will conspire to turn internet regulation into a morass as well. It sounds good to say that rural areas should have access to internet service, but opening that can of worms is a disaster in the making.

Infrastructure regulation in the U.S. is a disaster because of the disproportionate power of rural voters. It's not efficient to build infrastructure to rural and exurban areas, but rural votes, particularly in the Senate, hold infrastructure projects hostage unless inefficient infrastructure is built in those areas. That's why Amtrak is obligated to run a nationwide network when it should just run a train line from DC to Boston. Indeed, the desire to provide universal service is responsible for much of the dysfunctional aspects of the telecom industry to begin with. Many cable providers are monopolies because municipalities granted monopoly status as a concession for building service broadly instead of just to the profitable locations.

Look at the aspects of the telecom industry that are actually getting people excited. T-Mobile's new LTE network, for example. The reason it works is because T-Mobile avoids a whole bunch of capital construction by only focusing on urban areas. Cities get LTE, and everyone else gets HSPA or 2G. Or look at Google's fiber service: hitting major urban areas and avoiding anywhere that doesn't yield a lot of subscribers per mile of fiber. That's the right way forward--that's how we get internet speeds in the U.S. that match countries in Asia and Europe that are much more heavily urbanized. Treating internet service the way we treat other public infrastructure will destroy that.

With services like Facebook, Twitter, etc, the telcos know more or less what they can expect in average data usage from users (and plan/charge accordingly).