541–550 of 1001 posts
He's right about a lot of things. But, as far as education goes, if everyone got a degree, then what's the point? it would have no value at all. The whole point of awarding degrees is to separate those who have them from those that don't. How are employers supposed to know who to higher, if everyone has a degree?
We gave the lazy guys, good story tellers, all the power, and thereby the power how money flows and works.
Money is such a story: There exists some artificial thing, that can be turned into anything we want. What in reality doesn't exist, unless people work for it. Its seams more a trust relation turned into a fetish.
Obviously the stories turned everything in to giant circus pyramid game to generate more magic stuff, and everybody can have it. Well the poor without power, we keep stupid and poor, we can outsource to them, to do all the work and we all become story tellers.
Technology developed by curious nerdy scientists (also bad story telleres btw), could be used that a few are enough to feed and build for many many story tellers. Looks like magic, money can work for itself, hey more magic.
People who actually do something like women and artist and builders are continiously undervalued in this pyramid system as they are not 'usefull'. The working slaves all produced a lot of useless stuff. And as the majority became lazy guys, hey why change anything that is the way the world 'works'.
No, a little virus shows all was big story. In fact there is no magic stuff. Money is no value in it self. Now the few able to build are somewhere far away and take care of themselves.
Now the undervalued, who do the work are suddenly in high demand. Oh we clap and say thank you, thank you, but giving them power, mmmm do we really have to? Can we not just move on, go back to slavery fast.. Suddenly doing became interesting but hey please help can't do any more. I can generate trillions of magic paper if you want, eh trust me, please help. Lets get back fast to the time when the pyramid system worked, and we have to keep dreaming and move on.
It is likely that, we want to keep going on. Allthough it was just fun for a few. Humans love to continue to follow the path they are used to go.
Money is an invention and the way it flows is an expression of power but without trust it is useless. It doesn't do anything.
We all need food, a shelter, health, love, relations and a lot curious people solving hard problems, learning what makes a virus go around and how to stop it.
We should start to transform the rules and redefine how money works. For some this idea is so strange as this is a well known constant from heaven. It is not.
What if we give everybody some of this fuel. As long as you live you get money=trust every week just by existing you don't have to earn it and otherwise starve to death and die on the street. Then you can use your power, your vote to tell who you trust to send you a product or service. Oh but it becomes worthless over time. If you don't spend it, it becomes just paper. So no interest rates, no accumulation not inheriting wealth. Only one will have to pay for it, the earth we all together. What if...
What if we all share our knowlege for free..
Mmm now we have time to think. Some people don't like that. ..The long we think the more they yell to go back back...
A nice little story to good to be true.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt Marc has anywhere near enough capital to get these things done (by himself). 2 trillion is on a completely different order of magnitude. That said, maybe this post is a call for help and the billionaires will unite?
He could call Harvard and donate a bunch of developers for a year to build that system which could educate a million 18 year olds. Harvard will certainly take his call. He couldn’t fund all the hyper efficient factories for the country, but he could build one.
> ... The things we build in huge quantities, like computers and TVs, drop rapidly in price. The things we don’t, like housing, schools, and hospitals, skyrocket in price. What’s the American dream? The opportunity to have a home of your own, and a family you can provide for. We need to break the rapidly escalating price curves for housing, education, and healthcare, to make sure that every American can realize the d…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In many cases, I am not sure his solutions address the real problem. Housing is rising in price as more people pile into fewer cities. There is no housing crisis in Spartanburg, Louisville, Lethbridge or even Houston. You can build all the homes you want, but unless they are in Manhattan or San Franciso, a billion new homes won't make the condos there cheaper. You can also build all the colleges you want, but the ret…
> I had a conversation with a dean of a university about offering online courses and the reason they said they would never do it seriously is because that would greatly devalue that people admitted to that school were top tier and thus were top tier on the way out. IMO that's pretty short-sighted. This line of reasoning is that the degree is valuable _because_ its exclusive, not because the degree is evidence of part…
The dean didn't disagree that this was a major aspect of its value.
> If you simply took the exact same course structure and grading from a Harvard degree and put it online for thousands, the skills gained would be identical.
And which one would find jobs the easiest?
> It's unfortunate that this dean values those things over increased access to education.
The dean realizes that in a digital society, most things rapidly become winner take all. Their university has cachet, but not Harvard level cachet. They do not think that 99% of universities would survive everyone moving to online education.
> The problem is desire. We need to want these things. The problem is inertia. I agreed with most of the essay until I got to this point, at which point I rolled my eyes and briefly skimmed the rest. It's akin to people who say that the reason there are so many overweight people is that they lack willpower and motivation. Look at pictures from middle-America in the late 1940s - virtually everyone is thin, whereas tod…
Weren't they rationing foodstuffs?
"We should have gleaming skyscrapers and spectacular living environments in all our best cities at levels way beyond what we have now; where are they?"
NO thank you, we are not part of your ultra neoliberal project.
China is the place with the 'most skyscrapers' and it's a craphole for most citizens.
There is absolutely no reason to 'massively build' other than cram more people in and line the pockets of the investor class.
"We have top-end universities, yes, ... Why not educate every 18 year old?"
Marc, with all due respect, do you remotely grasp the notion of 'class' and what's going on with our schools? (Edit - I'm not saying I agree with it, but it exists for certain reasons)
First - the US sends a huge percentage of it's youth to College - far more than other places.
Second - many of them do not qualify and more and more are having to attend remedial classes. LA County kids were graduating at 55% rate, then 'poof' they lowered the standards to get a 77% rate.
US students are largely NOT ready for elite education. The issue is not 'getting everyone to harvard' - the issue is 'getting everyone who deserves to go to a decent school - into one'. This actually isn't a huge problem in the US.
Third - we DONT need more college! College was a legit mark of the elite (legitimately) but it's not anymore. We are failing huge cohorts of kids that do not go to college! The 'problem' is that we provide no path for non-college educated kids to get into the system. We also like to most college kids who think they get a free job. Nope.
Fourth - Education will always be at least somewhat elite. There will always be 5% who are considerably more spectacular, and they deserve a place to go. The US system is not perfect, but it's not bad either.
And this Thiel-esque bit: " 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?"
No - this post WW2 vector is the wrong kind of 'brute' Engineering. You know what matters more than 'supersonic flight'? Getting a much cheaper and safer flight. And guess what, that has been happening. The market pushes innovation in a specific direction and sorry, it's not 'to the moon' it's to 'LA to NY' for 1/2 the price.
Finally his bit about factories. I share his concern, but at the same time, he writes as though he completely ignores market realities again. We don't build more factories in the US because we've * externalized human rights* to another nation. If Chinese factories can pay pennies, fire people for going to the bathroom, spy on everyone 24/7, pollute up the yang, have the government back national players with money from the central bank and force international competitors out of business ... when then you see why there are 'few factories' in the US.
The 'answer' to 'more physical building' is something he is unwilling to say and that is a nationalist cause with trade barriers, something that neoliberals absolutely hate.
With issues such as lack of PPE, ventilators and chems. for testing it becomes much more clear obviously.
What would happen if the government literally said 'We declar this, that and this sector to be 'strategically imperartive' and therefore all production must happen within the country'. Well guess what? Those 'fancy factories' would get built. It would still be more expensive than China - but - the huge benefit from that is that this would entail a huge transfer of wealth to the poor and less educated for their doing actual, meaningful work. Which is always better than welfare or UBI.
Now - combine this 'factory' problem with the 'what do we do with all these no-college people' and you start to see how these issues resonate.
So yes we need to be 'building' but we need to be building 'up' not 'out'.
'Building out' is a 19th and 20th century strategy. More more more, bigger bigger bigger. Sorry - we are at least for now more advanced than China et. al. and the plan should be 'better'.
We do not need large scale migration or even construction. What we need is a way to make our system fair, accessible, to make sure that 'everyone gets a spot' in the system that has dignity. All of our institutions to work at a higher level - for example, government IT is a complete mess - our services could be improved dramatically with smart policies. US University Systems could expand in the 5 Billion-person developing world, for example. The US is going to help fare more people in the world by being better on all fronts than just having a bigger body count.
I think we can all kind of agree with the impetus of Marc's rant, but I think this is not particularly well thought out, he could take this one as a first draft.
This doesn’t seem like a fair criticism. How do you create a vaccine for a disease you’ve never encountered? We have a hard enough time guessing the right flu strain to vaccinate against let alone a virus like Covid.
And people seem to ignore the flip side of this - spending money to prepare for something that never happens. I’ve seen plenty of people criticizing the government for buying tens of millions of doses of Tamiflu and Cipro that just expire unused.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Supersonic flight is inefficient and noisy. Drones are noisy, a hazard, and significantly more limited due to lithium density than electric cars. High-speed rail is not illegal, but requires huge capital. Uber may not be economically viable, and there are serious concerns about middle-men marketplace corps socializing the liability, benefits, and wage instability costs the gig economy brings with it.
Cars are noisy, a hazard, and in some ways significantly more limited than horses. I actually agree with all your points but also recognize there’s a strong prior bias toward what “I know” works or doesn’t today that can preclude the future possibilities.
As for drones and supersonic aircraft, we're going to need much better batteries for the former and far more efficient engines for the latter to them to be more viable than present alternatives. That's not a "what I know bias", it's in hard math and numbers.
It's like how most ships in popular sci-fi are these futuristic, oblong shapes with wondrous curves, when in fact a more realistic approach would be using rectangles for everything but a few niche applications. For anything that humans are going to walk around in/actively use rectangular structures are simply far more efficient. It was true 10,000 years ago, it'll be true 10,000 years from now assuming we're not living in Musk's simulation.