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It’s Time to Build
81–90 of 1001 posts
Re: It’s Time to Build
#82> 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…
The federal government continued to spend trillions of dollars a year during this period of austerity you're referring to. Any liquidation of emergency stocks was not motivated by financial need.
Federal and state governments are different.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#83> 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…
How many large companies have come from federal grants? How much would that tax actually generate? If the govt can print money in emergencies as needed, what would the taxes have done?
I don't see how concentrating more money in the organization that is the worst at spending it will produce any more value.
Modern govt isn't failing from lack of funds, it's how those funds are spent that is the problem.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#84a16z's portfolio is an ICU ward of companies all on ventilators. Marc does not have the answers, sorry.
Silicon Valley needs to have a massive die-off of over-built solutions for what the world of 2014 wanted.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#85I don't know why soaring skyscrapers should be viewed as some sort of penultimate view for the future. With remote work tech, we can rid ourselves of the need for dense urban cores, and we can decentralize our population centers more appropriately.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#86I 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. It's interesting that he manages to say completely uncontroversial things, yet do so in such a way that even he finds them controversial. Is there a word for this phenomenon? Rew…
I don't have an issue with the ideas. I agree with many of them. I just find it a bit absurd that one of the top 1000 people capable of putting them into action is telling other people to go do it while he spends his time investing in them. Capital is obviously helpful and crucial for building companies, but he is obviously satisfied waiting for solutions to walk in the door rather than chasing them himself.
Him funding many effective people working on big ideas at once is probably more effective than him doing one idea himself.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s not an idea for building, that’s just an idea for the government getting more money. The government clearly doesn’t actually need the money when it cares to do something (based on the stimulus bill and the last decades of deficits).
From my original post: Governments DID see this coming, both federal and state. California, at one time, was prepared for exactly this crisis. The 2008 financial crisis wiped out state budgets
BS. If they were prepared, where did everything go? CA had lower income so they burned all the PPE and shut down hospitals?
Re: It’s Time to Build
#88> I’m with Nicholas Stern when he says that capitalism is how we take care of people we don’t know — all of these fields are highly lucrative already and should be prime stomping grounds for capitalist investment, good both for the investor and the customers who are served. I'm not familiar with Nicholas Stern, and will look him up, but does anyone here want to elaborate as if you were talking to a five-year-old?
Not a subscriber to this view, but the concept is that we take care for our family and friends for free, and charity is driven by showing us real people rather than cold facts. For the rest of the "people we don't know", investment and payments are capitalism's way of helping them out.
In this context, it sounds like he's surprised that investors are waiting for government to bail out any normally-profitable airlines, rather than making an investment or buying in while keeping them afloat. This seems simplistic to me; the cost of maintaining an airline or hotel for the upcoming no-revenue months is so high that your investment would be lost.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#89It’s great to see this passion and sentiment. I wholeheartedly agree. In my opinion, the deficiencies that the pandemic is unmasking in the american system need a political solution and change. Looking for heroic activism isn’t going to fix the systemic issues. The left starts out with a stronger bias toward the public sector in many of these areas. To which I say, prove the superior model! Look to the European democ…
I don’t think there is evidence of European governments being any more competent during this pandemic.
Well, if you know that the US represents half the spending on healthcare in the world (!) and that its GDP per capita is 20-60% higher than even the one of Western European countries plus the fact that its total GDP is higher than the EU one... You might be excused for expecting a better result in the US.
Re: It’s Time to Build
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
All of them started late but Germany seems to be on top of the situation. Singapore and Taiwan are much closer to them then the US.
I don't know, it looks like Singapore has missed a step somewhere. Adjusted for population and looking at the curves logarithmically, they're not doing so well.
Population adjustment doesnt make much sense imho. Until you have a significant fraction of exposed population the dynamics will be the same.