71–80 of 141 posts
This is where the pessimism comes from. While a very small number of high-tech areas have gone fast-forward into the future and are way better off, the vast majority of the country has been left behind.
Fix that, and people will be optimistic again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So the argument is that monopolies are ok so long as they are won fair and square? Umm... ok.
The irony is that any company that is legitimately better than their competitors has no choice but to become a monopoly.
I really appreciate many points in this article, especially showing that people in the 60s thought that they were in just as much of a decline as we do now. But there's also a weird anti-environmentalism threaded through the article. Toward the end, the author lists things that we now think are bad, as an example of how we've become pessimistic. Including: "New subdivisions represented a threat to the landscape rathe…
-Just because we are correctly critical of some aspects of technological process doesn't mean we have become a bunch of petty pessimists who are just trying to make everyone feel bad. maybe you stop at those things, i doubt thats the case but lets assume you do. you think these ideas are a tree with the wind of truth and reason blowing through your leaves. however its a tree in a forest of never ending complaining, n…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are some very disturbing stories about extreme conditions in the warehouse. There's a good NYT article about it ( http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/inside-amazons-very... ) This is the piece I heard about: So many ambulances responded to medical assistance calls at the warehouse during a heat wave in May, the paper said, that the retailer paid Cetronia Ambulance Corps to have paramedics and ambulances st…
That's from 2011. Amazon bought Kiva Systems to install robots in their warehouses. No more walking around in Amazon's newer warehouses; the pickers stand in one place as shelving units of products are brought to them by hundreds of mobile robots. Picking from bins is still manual, but Bezos has Rethink Robotics, which he owns personally, working on that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The manhattan project wasn't incremental. Nor was the apollo program nor the hoover dam. It does seem like we (America) have moved into a mode of thinking where instead of asking, "what do we want to build?" we ask, "based on the advances at the edge of iterative academic or technical progress, what is now possible to build?" In short, Thiel's argument that America has mostly transitioned from optimistic determinists…
It's not a great argument. The Manhattan Project wasn't incremental but it was a reaction to scientific advance. It started after Einstein's letter to Roosevelt warning that an atomic bomb was possible [1], not someone saying "hey, let's build a really big bomb because optimism." The Apollo program was built on incremental advances in rocketry going back to von Braun (at least), mostly funded due to military competit…
The problem is that the US has too many people who were actually better off in the past. This is where the pessimism comes from. While a very small number of high-tech areas have gone fast-forward into the future and are way better off, the vast majority of the country has been left behind. Fix that, and people will be optimistic again.
Most insightful comment on here.
Thiel has some good points about the lack of progress. Rocketry is only slightly better than it was 45 years ago. We've hit the limit of chemical fuels, and weight reduction can only go so far. In comparison, 45 years took us from the Wright Flyer to the first jet aircraft. Fission power isn't much further along than it was 45 years ago, either. Nor is fusion power. Nor is power transmission. At the high-power end of…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My main concern with Peter Thiel praising monopolies is that the nuance of the message will get lost - "earning monopoly through radical innovation" - but the core message remains - monopoly = profit. People will start to pat themselves on the back for acquiring all their competitors, skewing regulations in their favor, and a variety of other sleazy business tactics. I suspect most large business CEOs already underst…
So the argument is that monopolies are ok so long as they are won fair and square? Umm... ok.
“Monopolies drive progress. The promise of years or even decades of monopoly profits provides a powerful incentive to innovate.” http://www.technologyreview.com/review/531491/the-contrarian...
If you want Grand Engineering, why not get behind the Soviets? Their progress to space outclasses any other non-US country. So why is Russia a second world country, with world-class math, science, and comp-sci talent? Further: the 'softer' half of any Tech-accelerator - consumer apps or anything ad-based - would be a non-starter for venture capital if it were based in Russia. But Russians do have the ambition and ski…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The manhattan project wasn't incremental. Nor was the apollo program nor the hoover dam. It does seem like we (America) have moved into a mode of thinking where instead of asking, "what do we want to build?" we ask, "based on the advances at the edge of iterative academic or technical progress, what is now possible to build?" In short, Thiel's argument that America has mostly transitioned from optimistic determinists…
It's not a great argument. The Manhattan Project wasn't incremental but it was a reaction to scientific advance. It started after Einstein's letter to Roosevelt warning that an atomic bomb was possible [1], not someone saying "hey, let's build a really big bomb because optimism." The Apollo program was built on incremental advances in rocketry going back to von Braun (at least), mostly funded due to military competit…
We just got lucky because the military thought of another use for rockets and provided the insane amounts of funding necessary for the development. We very nearly would have had space ships powered by nuclear bombs that would have been able to reach Jupiter in months, but unfortunately the military's interest in space waned and the test ban treaty precluded nuclear pulse propulsion for the foreseeable future.
