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Anti-Tesla sentiment and the death of optimism

cjohnson.io

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Re: Anti-Tesla sentiment and the death of optimism

#71

Post by MacsHeadroom »

tempestn wrote: post #59
CamperBob2 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I see nukes as more ethical than patents. You can make the argument that MAD-based nuclear deterrence has saved us (at least so far) from a third world war. Not everyone will agree, of course, but a strong case can be made. On the other hand, to defend patents, you have to show that there are things on the market that we can buy that would not have been made available to us if not for patent rights. Nobod…

Two things: First, you might want to clarify in the first paragraph that you're talking about the existence of nukes, as opposed to the use of nukes. It's clear from reading your entire comment, but I find it's good to play it safe with that sort of topic! ;) Second, to play devil's advocate, is it possible that landmines could have a net positive impact if they could somehow be properly, globally regulated? For and…

How's this for "correctly?" http://www.defensivepatentlicense.com/

Kind of like copyleft- but for patents.

Re: Anti-Tesla sentiment and the death of optimism

#72

Post by novaleaf »

xianshou wrote: post #49
nostromo wrote: post #14

I've been thinking of patents as nukes during the Cold War lately. Superpowers (US/USSR, Apple/Google) acquire very large nuclear/patent arsenals under the guise of protection/defense. These arsenals are relatively cheap for superpowers to build, but they are expensive for small states (small countries/small businesses) to acquire. The US and USSR were roughly equivalent in their arsenals so it made little sense for…

Interestingly, this analogy works very much at the company level, but reverses at the country level. For companies, patents represent weapons in an arsenal, in which MAD prevents offensive action, as you've said. For countries, the reverse holds: a country that jettisons its patent architecture, or never evolved a restrictive one to begin with, will be a bastion for innovators. The stable equilibrium is no bad patent…

A nice hypothesis, do you have any examples that show this to be true?

The realist in me bets that innovation has only a weak relationship to IP laws, and rather a strong relationship to a certain world-view that fosters innovation since childhood (go USA!)

Re: Anti-Tesla sentiment and the death of optimism

#73

Post by mempko »

deciplex wrote: post #54
crusso wrote: post #44

The thing about capitalism, and our dismal history with capitalism-at-large, the "assume the other party is a shitbag" idea is so fundamentally ingrained in our cultural What's that got to do with Capitalism? Correct me if I'm making a straw man, but the alternative to capitalism is to remove negotiation from individual interactions by implementing more State-heavy mechanisms like Communism. Isn't creating a crap-ton…

Honestly, what does regulation have to do with capitalism - where did this meme start and how can I kill it? Capital markets are a tool for allocating resources. They're pretty good at it in that they tend to work better than e.g. palace economies and mostly everything else humans have tried. But there is absolutely nothing to the way that capital markets work that suggests regulation somehow breaks it or whatever ot…

There are known problems of markets in the form of externalized costs. Global warming might be the greatest example of capitalism and markets being the worst thing humanity has every done in distributing resources....

Re: Anti-Tesla sentiment and the death of optimism

#74

Post by autokad »

"Of course, this applies way beyond Tesla. I believe the current skepticism around Silicon Valley's "Make The World a Better Place" mentality is deeply rooted in historical anxiety about institutional capitalism."

silicon valley really needs to get over itself. the only thing different about silicon valley and other companies is that silicon valley is to naive to realize they are just like every other company, no matter how much they doth protest.

companies dont set out to make the world a worse place for the most part, even hated companies like BP have good intentions. but if you want to be a publically traded company, and if you want to make money, you have to make profit.

i mentioned on HN before that its funny how Amazon is loved and Walmart is loathed. all the reasons why walmart is loathed Amazon has in spades.

i also feel your view on how capitalism works in the western world. in fact, it has always been a prisoners dilemma / golden rule do onto others as you would have them do onto you economy. thats actually a reason why capitalism has worked so well for the west, and one of the reasons why it took longer in places like China.

Re: Anti-Tesla sentiment and the death of optimism

#75

Post by yomritoyj »

robbrown451 wrote: post #70
yomritoyj wrote: post #66

The author is seriously mistaken about game theory. The Nash Equilibrium requires every player to be maximizing their payoffs given what the other players are doing. But game theory itself does not say what the nature of the payoffs are: there is no problem in modelling altruistic players who attach a high payoff to outcomes which are good for everyone and low payoffs to outcomes which benefit only themselves. The Pa…

I think when you allow for altruistic players, the core insights you get from game theory tend to vanish. I think the author had that part mostly right, actually.

But if you really are a selfish player, and you have somehow persuaded the other player to trust you and play "deny" then you should definitely play "confess" to maximize your payoff. With selfish players there is no way to move to ("deny","deny") in a one-shot Prisoners' Dilemma. Cultural change cannot help unless it amounts to a change in payoffs.

[The story would have been different in a coordination game with multiple Pareto-ranked equilibria where a change in beliefs can move you from a bad equilibrium to a good equilibrium.]

Re: Anti-Tesla sentiment and the death of optimism

#76

Post by deciplex »

wyager wrote: post #63
deciplex wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, what does regulation have to do with capitalism - where did this meme start and how can I kill it? Capital markets are a tool for allocating resources. They're pretty good at it in that they tend to work better than e.g. palace economies and mostly everything else humans have tried. But there is absolutely nothing to the way that capital markets work that suggests regulation somehow breaks it or whatever ot…

> But there is absolutely nothing to the way that capital markets work that suggests regulation somehow breaks it I don't think anyone is claiming that regulation necessarily breaks capitalism. It just tends to. Most regulations have very obvious innovation-stifling or friction-causing side effects that are deleterious to the free market.

The American government does this, but it mostly does it on behalf of the same folks trumpeting, to the masses, the virtues of capitalism as an ideology and end in itself. Anarcho-capitalism, really, or nearly so, although the ruling class itself is certainly not anarcho-capitalist of course. The ruling class has a clear interest in subverting free markets to keep the established players in power and any rivals out, and right now in America they are pretty much getting everything they could possibly want.

But contract enforcement, private property, impartial justice systems, and yes even intellectual property, copyright, and wealth redistribution, all contribute to more effective capital markets, and they are all borne of government regulation and laws. That the American government happens to be so thoroughly corrupt that it can't do a single thing right, doesn't change that.

Re: Anti-Tesla sentiment and the death of optimism

#77

Post by hindsightbias »

ajsharp wrote: post #67

I enjoyed your post. I have a couple of thoughts / suggestions for you. I got the impression that the underlying motivation for writing the post, and tactic you used for justifying your positions was largely in response to what I would consider the overly myopic hacker news user base. That is, disproportionately white, male, curmudgeoney programmers. I sympathize with your frustration, but urge you not to let their w…

Yes, I'd like to see the evidence that someone like Musk, Wozniak, and maybe arguably Jobs, are not just outliers.

As for his mention of the WWW, I don't credit the valley for all that and wonder if Vint Cerf has emoted about his mentality when coding TCP/IP.

> cultural norms

Not sure about that, unless you consider it a very recent 'value.' There was quite a bit of flaunting during the dot-com era.

Re: Anti-Tesla sentiment and the death of optimism

#78

Post by krisgenre »

Ygg2 wrote: post #47
noonespecial wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That and even if the states that developed them in the first place never intended to use them, they remain in the environment for many years after, poisoning entire regions of the landscape. Sometimes to the point of making those regions uninhabitable.

On the other hand, regions which make it uninhabitable for humans make it habitable for animals. Chernobyl is now a haven for wildlife.

That's interesting. I thought thought radioactivity was harmful to all life forms, any source?

Re: Anti-Tesla sentiment and the death of optimism

#79

Post by parasubvert »

tstactplsignore wrote: post #64
rayiner wrote: post #35

The idea that the Pareto-optimal situation is the one where everyone freely copies from each other may be appropriate for the market Tesla finds itself in, but is in general directly contradicted by the actual experience of the technology industry. The experience of the technology industry is that innovation happens in periods of monopoly. That monopoly might arise from first-mover effects, network effects, lock-in e…

I think you've cleverly bundled together a couple of meaningless correlations. Yes, there's a grab bag (but, in my opinion, not much more than that) of important technological innovations which have come from large companies, but so what? You still have corporations with large amounts of disposable cash for R&D in a world without monopolies and intellectual property. The handful of innovations you can mention don't r…

"majority of important software innovations have come from the open bazaar, not the cathedral. The Internet; The Web; Firefox, WebKit; GNU/Linux, Unix; HTTP; SSH, SSL, AES; Python, Ruby, C, C++."

The vast majority of those were not developed by an open bazaar, but rather by focused cathedral organizations: the early Internet, UNIX, C, C++, SSH, Firefox, SSL. The bazaar maintains them or cloned the success of others (SSH).

I also think you're vastly underestimating the influence and power over millions that continues to exist from closed commercial software: Apple iOS, IBM zOS, pOS, and DB2, SAP ERP, Oracle database, middleware, and various HR/SCM/CRM/ERP suites, Microsoft Office and Windows / IIS. The big difference is that there is an order of magnitude more revenue and more people being paid to work with commercial software than with open source.

That you claim all serious servers run Apache or Ngnix on *nix is profoundly ignorant of the millions of Windows servers and IIS servers out there, some of which power very large websites. I think Ngnix is a great server, but most of the large enterprises (banks, Telcos, etc) I've visted in my consulting run WebSphere or IIS and have never heard of HAproxy or Ngnix.

This is not to say this is a static state of affairs. Certainly in many cases the open source alternative is a better technology or better project, sometimes even the better product. Just there's a big difference between an innovative PRODUCT and an innovative PROJECT. There are lots of the latter on Github, but other than saving people some money, they're not having anywhere the economic impact a PRODUCT has.

There is scant evidence that open source leads to more innovative products. There's a lot of evidence it helps to lower the acquisition costs of supporting software for what usually wind up as partly proprietary products. All of the latest software kings: Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, Salesforce, Google - their primary money making innovations are closed source built on (mostly non GPL) open source . Their contributions of open componentry back to the community is welcome but limited.

The only large and "purely" open company is Red Hat, and even they go through major hoops to make it inconvenient for others (eg. oracle) to use their open source code for their own purposes (ie. Offer a RHEL clone and loss lead on support). They remain innovative. But so is SAP. So is Oracle.

Re: Anti-Tesla sentiment and the death of optimism

#80

Post by jon2512chua »

ajsharp wrote: post #67

I enjoyed your post. I have a couple of thoughts / suggestions for you. I got the impression that the underlying motivation for writing the post, and tactic you used for justifying your positions was largely in response to what I would consider the overly myopic hacker news user base. That is, disproportionately white, male, curmudgeoney programmers. I sympathize with your frustration, but urge you not to let their w…

> Today's tech "entrepreneur" rarely looks like Elon Musk, someone who genuinely seems to want to do good things for the world. The skeptisism exists because there are a lot of startups doing plain silly things, masked in global do-goodery marketing narrative.

I would say that it's more of today's entrepreneur genuinely believe that they're doing good, but are just terribly misguided.

Of course, that's just how it feels to me.

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